Issue 25 by San Francisco Public Press

independent

COOPERATIVES:

nonprofit

JOURNEYS THROUGH DEPRESSION: A mother,

A new nonprofit organization helps build community in the city of Richmond. | 9

in depth

daughter climb out. • Her own worst enemy: Grappling with the other “voice” in her head. • Schizophrenia: Son struggles, family copes. • Identity claimed: Gay artist defeats her shame. • Cannot be stopped: Bipolar, homeless and back in college. | 10-11

SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG • $1.00

SUMMER 2018 • ISSUE 25

By Noah Arroyo // Public Press

ack in the spring, Berkeley’s rent board jumped out in front of San Francisco on a vote that could bring the most significant change to California housing in decades. A grassroots campaign had just announced it had gathered enough signatures for Proposition 10, a statewide November ballot measure to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act. The 1995 state law took power from local governments, restricting their ability to enact or expand rent-control laws. If voters strike down Costa-Hawkins, cities will have new policy tools to help build more housing while trying to curb soaring rents and displacement. Anticipating a repeal of the law, Berkeley officials moved quickly. They crafted a companion ballot measure asking city voters to approve a novel policy — called “rolling” rent control in some circles — to apply rent control gradually to additional apartments for decades to come. It would also immediately apply to as many as 2,000 additional units in Berkeley, about 10 perLandlords cent more than currently covered. vs. If adopted in San Francisco, it would Renters extend rent control to at least 32,500 additional apartments — an almost 20 percent increase — and to thousands more in later years, based on estimates from UC Berkeley researchers. The policy approach could reverse the loss of rent-controlled homes, and might be a compromise that real estate developers, landlords and tenant-rights groups could live with, said state Assemblyman Rob Bonta, an Oakland Democrat, who co-sponsored a legislative attempt at CostaHawkins repeal that failed in Sacramento in January. “We get the new construction that we all want, and we get the additional rent-controlled units for those who need it,” Bonta said about rolling rent control. “What we have now is a broken system, obviously. If it worked, we wouldn’t have the biggest housing crisis in the state of California.” Rolling rent control would retain existing tenant and landlord protections and apply them automatically to prop-

REMAKING

RENT CONTROL

HOUSING

SOLUTIONS

If voters strike down Costa-Hawkins this fall, cities will regain power to regulate housing. But would that help or hurt the affordability crisis?

RENT CONTROL continued on Page 6

Illustration by Reid Brown // Public Press

Cities Sic Taxman on Vacant ‘Ghost Homes’

MORE HOUSING SOLUTIONS COVERAGE

Reining in Real Estate Speculators: Politicians are struggling to regulate buyers who flip properties for a quick profit, without regard to displaced renters. | 3

Oakland votes on levy in fall; S.F. may in 2019

FREE LEGAL HELP: Tenants of all incomes will get counsel when facing eviction. | 4

By Liz Enochs // Public Press

I Attorney Carolyn Gold says tenants need lawyers to fend off evictions. Charley Goss, of S.F. Apartment Association, says that counsel should not be funded with tax dollars.

s an abundance of vacant units worsening the Bay Area’s housing crisis? That’s what some politicians have suggested. Their solution: a new tax on landlords who leave residential and commercial properties unrented. Oakland voters will decide in November whether to levy a parcel tax on empty apartments, condominiums and townhouses, plus all vacant industrial and commercial buildings and lots. If two-thirds approve, Oakland would become the first U.S. city to tax so-called ghost homes. In San Francisco, voters could face a similar measure next year. A vacancy tax was floated in 2015 by

PROGRESSIVE

IDEOLOGICAL CONTINUUM

TENANT-LANDLORD MEDIATION: Solving

disputes before they become lawsuits. | 5

S.F. STARTUP HELPS TEACHERS BUY HOMES:

Company pays half the down payment, gets some of the profit upon sale. | 9

OUR 2014 SPECIAL REPORT ON SOLUTIONS: sfpublicpress.org/ housingsolutions

Aaron Peskin

John Avalos

Photos by Garrick Wong // Public Press

David Campos

Eric Mar

Jane Kim

Hillary Ronen

Sandra Lee Fewer

Norman Yee

London Breed

Jeff Sheehy

then-Supervisor Eric Mar and again in 2017 by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who, in a research request to the City Attorney’s Office, cited its potential to “help mitigate the impacts of the widespread practice of warehousing valuable residential and commercial units.” The most often-cited figure for a variety of vacant residential properties is 30,000, which is based on U.S. Census data cited in a 2014 report by the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, a local public-policy think tank. Peskin aide Sunny Angulo confirmed that the supervisor’s office is working to put a vacancy tax initiative before voters in 2019. She said Peskin decided not to push for this

November because “there are going to be a lot of taxes on that ballot.” She said it was too soon to provide details about the plan. Neither city would be the first to address what some critics have called a glut of vacant second homes hurting housing markets in some of the world’s most desirable cities. Paris began taxing second homes in 2015, and two years later tripled its surtax to 60 percent of the standard property tax. In 2016, Vancouver, Canada, enacted a tax of 1 percent of the assessed value on homes unoccupied for 180 days or more, the first in North America. This year Melbourne, Australia, adopted a tax on properties empty more than six months, and Hong Kong policymakers said they, too, were considering a vacancy tax. VACANCY TAX continued on Page 8

MODERATE

Ahsha Safaí

Malia Cohen

Ed Lee

Julie Christensen

BACK PAGE WHERE THEY STAND: How UC Davis faculty used voting records to map the city’s top politicians along a spectrum. | 12

Mark Farrell

Katy Tang

Scott Wiener

2 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2018

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SAN FRANCISCO

FROM THE EDITORS

Against the Algorithm

hough the newspaper and sfpublicpress.org are still the main way we communcate with readers, like many news organizations we’re always looking ahead toward changes in how people consume local news. We recently tried a new way of connecting directly with readers craving insider info on city politics: Project Text, a two-month pilot in partnership with the Alpha Group at Advance Digital. We deployed veteran political reporter Joe Eskenazi to serve up daily text message tidbits — and several scoops! — around the June election. We love that so many people engaged with Joe and shared their own insights. We hope to launch another topic-focused text project this fall — stay tuned for details. In the meantime, we encourage San Francisco news mavens to join us as eager followers of Mission Local (missionlocal.org) where Joe was recently hired as managing editor. Many of you follow the Public Press on social media, and we will keep posting on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But Facebook has caused a lot of problems for journalists recently by changing its rules about what it calls “political content.” To combat fake news, the social giant started limiting distribution

Photo by Daphne Magnawa // Public Press

of journalism about politics along with political ads. This policy also applies to news stories referencing topics Facebook classifies as “national issues of public importance,” defined as: abortion, budget, civil rights, crime, economy, education, energy, environment, foreign policy, government reform, guns, health, immigration, infrastructure, military, poverty, social security, taxes, terrorism and values. In response to pushback from media DONATE NOW Online: sfpublicpress.org/membership Mail: San Francisco Public Press, 44 Page St., Suite 504, San Francisco, CA 94102 Call: 415-495-7377

outlets and journalism organizations, Facebook modified the policy and now captures promoted news stories (i.e. whenever publishers pay for increased visibility) about political issues and political ads in separate archives. To boost stories on the platform, journalists who cover hard news now face extra layers of authorization and scrutiny. We’ve decided not to pursue authorization for this service, which we think could have unforseen consequences for participating news organizations. You’ll still see our stories on Facebook, but we’ll depend on organic distribution, since most of our stories will get caught in the political and issues-of-public importance-filters. We’re not alone in our thinking and are heartened to be part of a national coalition of news organizations appealing to Facebook to change these rules. We’ll let you know what happens. In the meantime, the best and most certain way to get updates about the latest Public Press reporting and events remains our email newsletter. Sign up here — sfpublicpress.org/newsletter — and you’ll always be in the know. Lila LaHood Publisher

PUBLIC PRESS INDEPENDENT NONPROFIT IN DEPTH The mission of the San Francisco Public Press is to enrich the civic life of San Francisco by delivering public-interest journalism through print and interactive media not supported by advertising. 44 Page St., Suite 504 San Francisco, CA 94102 415-495-7377 info@sfpublicpress.org Summer 2018 • Issue 25 (Vol. 9, No. 2) Published July 27, 2018

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Patricia M. Bovan Campbell Kaizar Campwala David Cohn Liz Enochs Neal Gorenflo Kari Gray Lila LaHood Holly Million Peter Scheer Michael Stoll

Michael Stoll Executive Director

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Michael Stoll

PUBLISHER Lila LaHood

SPLIT THE DIFFERENCE ACROSS 1. Scrabble play 5. Broods 10. Coke, e.g. 14. Singleton 15. Light work? 16. Wicked 17. Hourly compensation 18. “Roman Holiday” scooter 19. CDs and LPs 20. One of the Allman Brothers 22. Seventh heaven 24. “Frida” star Hayek 25. New ___ (Kiwi’s home) 27. Circus clown’s tumble 31. Celtic language 32. ___ Lingus (Irish carrier) 33. Faithfully following 36. Thirst quenchers 37. Waterproof cloth 39. “Well, Did You ___!” (Cole Porter song) 42. ___ tank (disposal system) 43. Ballpark fig. 46. Paparazzi target 48. Lunch counter order 50. What may fit all 53. Sci-fi character 54. Big-top swing 56. Bowling alley button 57. Maestro Riccardo 58. Mountain chain 60. The way they spell 7 down in 7 down 62. Opera conductor Daniel (or backwards, a famous Roman) 63. Pizza topping

DIRECTOR OF MEMBERSHIP & COMMUNITY

Crossword by Andrea Carla Michaels

Daphne Magnawa

PART WAYS 2 Andrea Carla Michaels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 64. Newspaperman Adolph ACROSS 65.1.With 67-Across, Scrabble play take leave; 14 15 a hint to the circles in 5.and Broods 22A, 27A, 37A, 54A 10. Coke, e.g. 17 18 66. incident 14.Bench-clearing Singleton 20 21 22 67. 65 Across 15.See Light work? 16. Wicked 24 DOWN 17. Hourly compensation 1. “I’m impressed!” 18. "Roman Holiday" scooter 27 28 29 30 2. How crazy things 19. CDssome and LPs 20.are One of the Allman Brothers 33 32 done 22. Seventh heaven 3. Coffee order 37 24. "Frida" starduring Hayeksleep 4. Had visions 25. New ___ (Kiwi's home) 5. Smooth the way 39 40 41 42 27. Circusor clown's 6. Bauxite azuritetumble 31. Celticland, language 7. Stalin’s in brief 48 46 47 32. ___ Lingus (Irish carrier) 8. Variety of quartz 50 51 52 33. Faithfully following 9. “Harry Potter” professor 36. Thirst quenchers 10. Bright blue 54 55 37.ForWaterproof cloth 11. the most part 39. "Well, Did You ___!" (Cole 12. Marriage or driver’s 58 57 Porter song) requirement 42.Hirt ___ tank (disposal system) 63 62 13. and Hirschfeld 43.U.S.-Mexico-Canada Ballpark fig. 21. 66 65 46.commerce Paparazzi pact target 48. Lunch counter order 23. Playing marble © 3/7/18 50.Pampering What may place fit all 24. 53. Sci-fi character 26. AL arrivals of 1973 4. Had visions during sleep 54.JFK Big-top swing 28. postings Smooth the way 40.5.Former Minnesota 56.“Mexican Bowling alley button 29. Spitfire” 6.governor Bauxite or azurite 57.star Maestro Stalin's land, in brief Velez Riccardo 41.7.More attentive 58. Mountain chain Variety of quartz 30. Jumped 43.8.Only Hitchcock film to win 60. The way they spell 7 down 9.Best "Harry Potter" professor 34. “Swan Lake” wear Picture in 7 down 10.Discolored Bright blue 35. Hollywood’s Ken or Lena 44. in spots 62. Opera conductor Daniel (or 11.“Addams For the most partCousin 37. 1960s Roger Moore 45. Family” backwards, a famous 12.Marceau Marriagecharacter or driver's TV series 47. Roman) requirement 38. “See if ___” 49. Bolshoi Ballet home 63. Pizza topping 13. Hirt and Hirschfeld 39. Environmentalist’s prefix 64. Newspaperman Adolph 21. U.S.-Mexico-Canada 65. With 67-Across, take leave; commerce pact and a hint to the circles in 23. Playing marble 22A, 27A, 37A, 54A 24. Pampering place 66. Bench-clearing incident 26. AL arrivals of 1973 67. See 65 Across 28. JFK postings

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DOWN 1. "I'm impressed!" 2. How some crazy things are done 3. Coffee order

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Michael Winter

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Noah Arroyo

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23 25

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31 34

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SOLUTION on Page 12

37. 1960s Roger Moore TV series 51. Goose eggs 38.Online "See ifpublication ___" 52. 39.Work Environmentalist's 55. on proofs, say prefix 40.Nevada Former gambling Minnesota haven 56. governor 57. Do a floor job 41.“IMore attentive 59. ___ You Babe” Sonny 43.&Only CherHitchcock film to win Best Picture 61. Letter addenda: Abbr. 44. Discolored in spots 45. "Addams Family" Cousin 47. Marceau character 49. Bolshoi Ballet home 51. Goose eggs 52. Online publication 55. Work on proofs, say 56. Nevada gambling haven 57. Do a floor job 59. "I ___ You Babe" Sonny & Cher 61. Letter addenda: Abbr.

The Reva and David Logan Foundation supports social justice, scholarship, the arts and investigative journalism. Dedicated to lasting support for the founders’ powerful and eclectic mix of grants. loganfdn.org

CONTRIBUTORS

Dawn L. Bassett (San Joaquin Delta College) Ianthe Chase (San Joaquin Delta College) Heidi Echols (San Joaquin Delta College) Theresa Harrington (EdSource) Tyler Jimenez (San Joaquin Delta College) Vanessa Lerma-Felix (San Joaquin Delta College) Jaya Padmanabhan (Break the Silence) Celine Pham (San Joaquin Delta College) Robert Raymond (Shareable) Taylor Wicks (San Joaquin Delta College)

CROSSWORD CONSTRUCTOR Andrea Carla Michaels

WEB EDITOR John Angelico

BUSINESS, OPERATIONS & WEB PRODUCTION

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Fund for Nonprofit News at The Miami Foundation administers the News Match, a national campaign to encourage grassroots support for nonprofit news organizations. The fund was established with grants from Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. miamifoundation.org

The Institute for Nonprofit News consists of 120 nonprofit, nonpartisan news organizations conducting investigative reporting in the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada. inn.org California Humanities promotes the humanities in California in order to help create a state of open mind, and aims to inspire Californians to learn more, dig deeper and start conversations that matter among our dramatically diverse people. calhum.org

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SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2018 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 3

“I think that you can have an anti-speculators tax and still support responsible landlords in maintaining their properties.” — Supervisor Jane Kim

By Liza Veale // Public Press

n their mayoral campaigns, former state senator Mark Leno and Supervisor Jane Kim emphasized the role of speculators in driving gentrification and displacement in San Francisco. To curb speculation, which has boosted prices and profits, Kim proposed a stiff tax to make it unprofitable to buy and quickly sell properties for a handsome profit — a practice called flipping, which has displaced renters citywide. Though voters rejected a similar tax in 2014, Kim said the idea “absolutely” still has a future, one that she plans to pursue. Leno pledged to take speculators to court — specifically those who repeatedly evict tenants by exploiting weaknesses in the state Ellis Act, which allows landlords to clear their buildings if they want to exit the rental business. He said speculators are robbing the city of desperately needed housing, a trend that is “not sustainable.” But what constitutes speculation? And would efforts to curb it pass political and legal muster? At heart, to speculate is to bet that housing prices will rise, based on increasing demand. Speculators profit because they capitalize on an upturn in the market, not because they create value or provide a service. Speculation drives displacement because it usually requires evicting or buying out tenants. It’s an engine of gentrification because it catalyzes turnover from lowerpaying renters to higher-paying tenants or buyers. There’s also evidence that speculation overheats demand and raises overall market prices, not just for those buildings bought by speculators. There’s no single way to distinguish speculation from other real estate transactions. It’s a murky concept. So, researchers and policymakers use various indicators. For example, cash purchases can be Landlords an indicator of speculative vs. investment because instiRenters tutional investors, unlike most individual buyers, have abundant capital to forgo a mortgage. Vacancies and foreign buyers are also possible indicators that units are being used for investment purposes rather than as a primary residence. In Kim’s version of a speculation tax, speculators are defined as flippers — buyers who resell their properties after a few weeks or months or a year of appreciation, with no intention of becoming long-term landlords. House flipping, by means of the Ellis Act or otherwise, is less prevalent in San Francisco than it was after the Great Recession, when the real estate market and high-paid technology jobs soared in tandem. In 2014, 54 percent of voters rejected an anti-speculation tax, Proposition G, one of the most furiously debated housing measures the city had seen in years. The real estate industry spent at least $1.4 million opposing the measure, which would have taxed speculators who resold properties quickly.

HOUSING

SOLUTIONS

ELLIS ACT ABUSERS When Leno talked about “taking speculators to court,” he referred specifically to Ellis Act abusers. Flipping property is immediately profitable only if an owner is able to sell a building quickly, replace existing rent-controlled tenants with new tenants paying market rents, or convert to condominiums. So intervening legally on speculators’ ability to evict is another way to curb speculation. No U.S. city has enacted a speculation tax. The closest to success was Washington, D.C., in 1978, when the district council passed such a levy. But it was quickly rescinded after opposition from real estate groups along with African-Americans, then the majority of residents. One explanation for its defeat is that African-Americans perceived the tax as an attempt to suppress the creation of property wealth by means of rehabilitating or selling properties by and for African-Americans. Such a narrative is unlikely in today’s San Francisco. Here’s how such a proposal would work: A graduated real estate transfer tax would be paid on multiunit buildings resold within

SPECULATORS IN POLITICAL CROSSHAIRS A tax or lawsuits would target ‘flippers’ to protect city tenants and rental housing

five years of purchase. If a building is resold within one year, the tax would be 24 percent of the resale price; within two years, 22 percent, and at five years, 14 percent. The point is not to generate city revenue, but discourage and eventually stop flipping. If Proposition G had passed, how many homes would have been protected from speculation? According to Redfin, a national real estate brokerage, 388 multiunit buildings have been resold within five years of purchase since 2012. Redfin estimates that would come out to about 970 units, or 162 every year. But it’s important to note there’s no way to know how many of those would have been exempt under Proposition G, which made allowances for things like emergencies or job transfers that might force a buyer to resell quickly. “The fact is that the vast majority of evictions are happening by seven to 10 large real estate speculators,” Kim said. But, she explained, the 2014 measure was portrayed by the opposition as burdensome to average San Franciscans. Jay Cheng, of the San Francisco Association of Realtors, said at the time that attacking speculation “was overtly politically driven policy and was not a solution for the issues we faced.” “There were a lot of misleading ads,” Kim

said. “The opposition spent a lot of money to conflate a speculation tax with a tax on regular homeowners,” such as those who have an in-law unit or a duplex. The opposition’s messaging prevailed despite the fact that owner-occupied buildings were exempt from the proposal. Kim now supports a version of the tax that applies only to buildings with three or more units. So far, however, no one has found a way for the tax to distinguish between flipping — quickly profiting from appreciation — and what’s considered “productive activity.” “If somebody buys the home and makes a bunch of improvements on it and then sells it, is that speculation or is that a productive business activity that uses available capital to improve the housing stock?” asked Eli Moore, a researcher with the Haas Institute at UC Berkeley. He cautioned that discouraging or penalizing rehabilitation could negatively affect contractors and anyone else in the construction trades. It might be possible to structure the tax in a way that distinguishes between pure speculation and more productive activity. It could, for example, exempt from taxation the value of improvements made to the building. But, so far, no such proposal exists. Kim doesn’t see renovation as a reason to

ABOUT THIS PROJECT In the summer of 2014, the Public Press examined creative solutions to San Francisco’s housing crisis. Four years later — with a measure on the November ballot to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, the 1995 state law limiting rent control — we’re again looking deeply at potential solutions aimed at renters and landlords: a novel, expanded form of rent control; a tax on vacant units; limits on speculation; and mediation or free legal counsel for tenants being evicted. All were raised during this year’s mayoral race, all are divisive, and all would require action by voters or city officials. Look for more coverage in our fall issue.

• REPORTING: Noah Arroyo, Liz Enochs, Andrew Stelzer, Liza Veale • EDITING: Michael Winter • COPY EDITING: Richard Knee, Dean Takehara, Sherman Turntine • GRAPHICS: Reid Brown • PHOTOGRAPHY: Sharon Wickham, Garrick Wong • PRINT DESIGN: HyunJu Chappell // Magna Citizen Studio • ONLINE: John Angelico More online: sfpublicpress.org/housingsolutions2018 See our 2014 special report: sfpublicpress.org/housingsolutions

Illustration by Reid Brown // Public Press

go soft on speculators. If capital is needed to maintain San Francisco’s housing stock, “I think that the city can and should provide low-interest rehabilitation loans,” Kim said. “We already do that … and we should greatly expand that program. I think that you can have an anti-speculators tax and still support responsible landlords in maintaining their properties.” If an anti-speculation tax prevails, it will likely be challenged in court. But San Francisco has “significant leeway in enacting tax legislation that has the effect of discouraging house flipping and the like,” said professor Leo Martinez, at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. Opponents of Proposition 13, which caps property taxes, unsuccessfully challenged a 1992 California Supreme Court ruling in which the justices declined to judge the wisdom of the system of taxation “absent harshness or oppression.” Martinez said he would “expect a similar challenge in a house-flipping tax,” and, as in the challenge to Proposition 13, “a failure of the argument.” In 2014, while Kim was pushing the anti-speculation tax, Leno tried and failed to reform the Ellis Act in the state Legislature. During his failed bid for mayor this year, the former supervisor and assemblyman said that, if he were mayor, he would work collaboratively with the City Attorney’s Office to build an unprecedented case to penalize scofflaw speculators.

TAKING THEM TO COURT “I would like to send the message to the folks who are doing this, that there’s a new sheriff in town,” Leno said. “They’re not going to be able to get away with this any longer.” The Ellis Act was written to protect landlords who want to go out of the rental business and must evict their tenants. But speculators exploit the law by purchasing buildings, temporarily “becoming landlords” and then invoking the Ellis Act to “go out of business” and evict everyone so the building can be quickly resold for a sizable profit. Since 2016, 163 San Francisco households have been evicted through the Ellis Act, according to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. The rate has stayed relatively steady after dipping during the recession. That number doesn’t reflect almost 1,879 tenants since 2015 who have accepted buyouts from their landlord rather than be evicted, Rent Board data show. It also doesn’t reflect the thousands more who are priced-out through other perfectly legal means. And yet, in Leno’s view, the city can’t afford to lose any rent-controlled dwellings. “It’s so expensive for us to build new affordable housing, our first priority has got

to be protecting the existing stock,” Leno said. “For every 10 new units we build we’re losing four. That’s not sustainable.” Leno’s 2014 effort was to amend the state law to prohibit owners from using the Ellis Act to evict tenants for five years after purchasing a building; limit repeated use of the Ellis Act to evict tenants from multiple homes; and to levy fines and penalties for violators. The San Francisco and national Realtors associations were, again, instrumental in defeating Leno’s reform effort. “Even if rental property owners are losing money every month, it would force property owners to stay in business against his or her will,” the Realtors wrote about Leno’s legislation. “The bill will only worsen the housing situation in San Francisco, and seriously impact the lives of small property owners and homeowner families.” The San Francisco Realtors group did not respond to numerous requests for comment on this story.

SPECULATION INFLUENCES MARKET Speculation doesn’t affect merely the tenants who are displaced or outbid. Because speculators with deep pockets or institutional financing can afford higher prices, they can overheat demand. That means average prices may rise sharply, and because property is overvalued, fall more precipitously at the end of a cycle than in markets with less speculative activity. Today, flippers are focusing on other areas of California where prices are rising and it’s easier to “buy low, sell high.” But, as always, the market is cyclical. Supporters of a speculation tax argue that it can be thought of as an automatic stabilizer, remaining dormant when speculation is low and activating to deter price increases due to the creation of artificial demand during boom times. However, it’s hard to predict how much curbing speculation would stabilize overall prices. Institutional investors aren’t the only ones with the means to outbid ordinary buyers. Over the past 12 years, one-fifth of single-family home and condominium sales in San Francisco were all cash, according to reporting by the statewide public affairs news site CALmatters. Some analysts say that institutional buyers dominated cash purchases in the years immediately following the recession, but that has changed, and a larger portion of buyers of real estate are super-rich individuals, often living outside the United States. Most of those all-cash properties weren’t flipped, however, so neither they nor the massive inequality driving housing unaffordability would be affected by antispeculation efforts.

4 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2018

Right to Counsel Will Aid Tenants Facing Eviction

“You want to keep people housed who have affordable housing. If those people lose their homes, you’ve just compounded your housing crisis because there’s nowhere for them to go.” — Carolyn Gold, attorney and tenant advocate

Voter-approved Proposition F may help hundreds By Andrew Stelzer // Public Press

ver the past year, with housing still expensive and scarce, more than 1,600 San Francisco tenants have received eviction notices. On June 5, city voters made history, guaranteeing legal help to anyone facing eviction, regardless of income. Proposition F passed with more than 55 percent support, making San Francisco, where renters make up nearly two-thirds of all households, the first city to pass such a law through a voter-approved initiative. Now comes the hard part: Meeting the deadline to set up the multimilliondollar program by July 2019. The results will likely Landlords to push forward a growing vs. “right to counsel” moveRenters ment for civil litigation. San Francisco is among a handful of cities across the country reframing discussions about when Americans should be given legal representation in noncriminal cases. “There is a movement afoot,” said Gloria Chun, an attorney at the Justice & Diversity Center of the Bar Association of San Francisco. “Everyone is keeping a close eye on San Francisco.”

HOUSING

SOLUTIONS

NEW YORK LEADS THE WAY San Francisco’s road to universal representation for tenants was paved in August 2017, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law the first-in-the-nation Right to Counsel in Housing Court. By the end of a five-year phase-in, an estimated 400,000 New Yorkers facing eviction will have access to some form of free legal assistance. Those earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line ($24,280 for an individual or $50,200 for a family of four) will be entitled to full representation throughout the eviction process. Those over that threshold will receive one consultation with a nonprofit or other legal services organization on the city’s list of providers. That law came after years of lobbying by housing advocates and a two-year period in which an explosion in city funds for civil legal services for tenants was shown to help keep residents in their homes. Since de Blasio took office in 2014, funding for legal assistance has risen from $6 million to over $77 million, and evictions have fallen 27 percent. San Francisco’s program is historic in that there will be no income limits, an acknowledgment that “middle-class tenants can’t afford lawyers either,” said Dean Preston, the chief proponent of the ballot measure. Thus, it will cover all of the city’s roughly 225,000 rental units, including the estimated 172,000 covered under rent control. Preston, an attorney and executive director of the statewide advocacy group Tenants Together, calls Proposition F a change from a “merit-based” to a “rights-based” model. Until now, a limited number of pro-bono attorneys has had to pick and choose which clients to represent. “We shouldn’t be deciding who does and doesn’t get an attorney based on how strong we think their case is,” said Preston. “Everyone should have representation.” Other jurisdictions have taken notice, and various forms of so called right-tocounsel pilot projects and legislation have popped up in Washington, D.C., Denver, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Though locales vary in size and demographics, the imbalance in power is consistent: a majority of landlords have attorneys, while less than 10 percent of renters receive legal assistance. “I’ve not yet seen any place where the rate of tenants that are represented comes anywhere close to the rate of landlords,”

IN NEW YORK CITY: Last August,

Mayor Bill de Blasio enacted the first-in-the-nation Right to Counsel in Housing Court, which is expected to help an estimated 400,000 New Yorkers.

“In some places the housing laws protects tenants more ... but without a lawyer to enforce those protections, it really doesn’t have much value.” — John Pollock, National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel

said John Pollock, coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. “In some places the housing laws protect tenants more than other places, but without a lawyer to enforce those protections, it really doesn’t have much value.” Pollock said his organization is in contact with about two-dozen jurisdictions, including Baltimore, Boston and Philadelphia. “It’s like almost every week I get in touch with advocates in another city,” he said. “We’re going to look at what happened in San Francisco and evaluate whether we can take a similar approach in other jurisdictions. It’s hard to imagine a place that doesn’t need it.”

HOW THE MEASURE WILL WORK With the election of Mayor London Breed, it’s not clear how the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development will choose to implement Proposition F’s mandate. Breed was a lukewarm supporter of the measure, which pushed aside a version she proposed that included means testing. She wanted a right-to-counsel law to go through the Board of Supervisors, rather than through a harder-to-tweak voterapproved initiative. But Preston said the law was crafted to allow city officials to determine the best way to implement it. The only stipulation is that MOHCD has 12 months to come up with a plan. There are no requirements for how it would be funded, or who exactly would provide the legal assistance. “We wanted this to be flexible and to be clear that the tenants have a right to counsel, that the city is obligated to provide it, to fund it. But not micromanage from the ballot how exactly the city does that,” said Preston, who announced in July that he was running for Breed’s former Board of Supervisors seat in an election to be held no later than 2020. He thinks the most likely route will be for the city to expand existing programs like the partnership with the bar association, which is fine with Gold. “If the city wants to maintain the system they have and just grow it, then so be it,” she said. Another indicator will be the city’s annual budget, which took effect July 1. With the 12-month clock on implementing Proposition F’s mandate ticking, Preston said there is a lot of planning and hiring that will need to happen this fiscal year. “This is not something that can be fully activated in a matter of weeks,” he cautioned, adding that the timeline “is an aggressive one.” “There’s no way that a fully functioning right to counsel will be in effect in July of 2019 if they don’t put some money in to ramp that program up,” he added. Since 2012, the city has dedicated more than $2 million annually to providing legal services to some, far short of what would be needed for universal representation. The city controller estimates that Proposition F will cost between $4.2 million and $5.6 million annually. Advocates predict it will be a money saver in the long run. “It’s really an investment that benefits everyone,” Pollock said. “When people lose their evictions and lose their housing, if they do wind up in a shelter, if they do wind up in jail, having to apply for public benefits because they lose their jobs, these are all costs that we all pay for, and they’re significantly more expensive than paying for a tenant’s attorney.”

‘WILL THE TENANT CAVE?’ Earlier this year, attorney Carolyn Gold, who runs the pro-bono landlord-tenant program at the bar association, was contacted by several tenants facing eviction. “All had strong defenses,” she said. “At least two of them, I would say, the landlord had absolutely zero grounds for their eviction.” But no lawyers were available to repre-

Photos by Garrick Wong // Public Press

Carolyn Gold, who runs the pro-bono landlord-tenant program at the San Francisco Bar Association, says the vast majority of people facing eviction are poor or middle class, making it “critical to have an attorney for your trial.”

A May 21 court order to evict tenants from 1045 Mission St. and collect back rent and damages. In 2017, the San Francisco Bar Association represented 642 tenants facing eviction, often keeping them in their homes.

sent them in court. Two of the tenants gave up, opting for a settlement that required them to move out. The other two held on and kept calling her. Moments before a judge was preparing to hear their case, Gold made a last-ditch effort and found an attorney. “As soon as that person entered the courtroom, the lawyer for the landlord said, ‘We do not intend to try this case,’” Gold recalled. “That’s why it’s so critical to have an attorney for your trial, because a lot of the cases really are just saying, ‘Will the tenant cave?’” The San Francisco Rent Board tallied 1,657 eviction notices filed between March 1, 2017, and Feb. 28, 2018, a 12 percent decline from the previous year. The annual average over the past decade is 1,723. The board does not know how many tenants were evicted, however. It has records only for eviction notices in cases when tenants did not pay rent or were not living in rent-controlled units. Landlords also are not required to report all evictions. Roommate eviction notices made up the largest proportional decrease (73 to 22), fol-

lowed by habitually paying rent late (110 to 59). The largest proportional increase was in capital improvement eviction notices (56 to 117), followed by Ellis Act evictions (127 to 201). Eviction notices for not granting landlord access also rose (16 to 23). The biggest numbers of eviction notices were for breach of rental agreement (402), committing a nuisance (337) and owner or relative move-in (297). In 2017, the Justice & Diversity Center represented 642 tenants facing eviction who did not have lawyers at settlement conferences. For those who got help, representation was quite often the difference that kept tenants in their homes. Assistance from an attorney “is a critical linchpin in keeping people housed,” said the bar association’s Chun. “You really should have access to one when basic human needs like housing and child custody are at issue.” In the crusade to represent San Franciscans facing eviction, 2012 was a pivotal year. The city declared itself the nation’s first “Right to Civil Counsel City.” A yearlong pilot program leveraged $100,000 into more than $2 million in pro-bono repre-

Dean Preston, of the advocacy group Tenants Together, calls Prop. F a change from a “merit-based” to a “rights-based” model.

sentation, coordinated by the bar association. During a crucial moment of citywide displacement, more than 800 cases received some form of legal assistance, and a Stanford University analysis found that more than 600 tenants facing eviction were more likely to avoid homelessness at least in part due to having a lawyer. But despite the project’s success, there still weren’t enough lawyers to go around. “We all realized that you cannot depend on pro bono to make sure that everybody will have an attorney,” Gold said. Proposition F’s primary opposition came from the San Francisco Apartment Association. Representing about 4,000 members, the organization argued that “evictions in San Francisco are actually pretty rare and are highly regulated,” according to spokesman Charley Goss. He maintained that many evictions were for “just cause,” involving tenants who should not receive free legal representation. “To the extent that people are being evicted COUNSEL continued on Page 5

LEGAL RESOURCES FOR EVICTIONS San Francisco • Eviction Defense Collaborative: 415-947-0797 • Bar Association of San Francisco Lawyer Referral Service: 415-989-1616 • Tenderloin Housing Clinic Legal Services: 415-771-9850 • Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach: 415-567-6255 • La Raza Centro Legal: 415-575-3500 • Housing Resource Guide: sfpr.es/sf-housing-resources-pdf Bay Area • Bay Area Legal Aid Legal Advice Line: 800-551-5554

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2018 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 5

“To the extent that people are being evicted for damaging the building ... we don’t believe that the city and taxpayers should fund eviction defense for those instances.” — Charley Goss, San Francisco Apartment Association

Hey, Can We Talk? Mediation Might Help Reduce Evictions Services have resolved other disputes between landlords and tenants By Andrew Stelzer // Public Press

Photos by Garrick Wong // Public Press

Charley Goss, the community and government affairs manager for the 4,000-member San Francisco Apartment Association, which opposed Proposition F in the June election, said that “evictions in San Francisco are actually pretty rare and are highly regulated.”

hen San Franciscans find themselves in conflict with a landlord, renter, roommate or neighbor, they’ve always had an option to avoid legal combat: mediation. At its best, the let’s-work-thisout approach can turn an ugly disagreement into a coming-together of sorts. So far, however, mediation has been used mainly to settle disputes short of tenantlandlord Armageddon — eviction. Amid the city’s growing housing crisis, some now see mediation as an alternative to nasty, expensive court fights to keep tenants housed and property owners content. For more than 20 years, that approach has staved off evictions in the capital of Wisconsin. “The strength about mediation is because it’s a process where people talk and listen,” said Jim Garrison, who for 30 years has worked at Community Boards, a nonprofit conflict-resolution center in San Francisco. The San Francisco Rent Board offers mediation as an alternative to binding arbitration. Sessions are facilitated by one of the Rent Board’s 10 administrative law judges. “It is a very important tool in the toolbox,” said the agency’s Joey Koomas, who emphasized that the collaborative process allows for creative, home-brewed resolutions, without just one winner and one loser. But Koomas said mediation is generally used for situations where the landlord hasn’t made necessary repairs or tenants are arguing over parking, not for a pending eviction. At least four Bay Area cities — Concord, Campbell, Fremont and San Leandro — offer tenants mediation over proposed rent increases. With its mediation program, the San Francisco Bar Association focuses on subsidized and supportive housing, though it is often used for smaller disputes. Attorney Carolyn Gold said it is “intended to reduce the need for eviction,” but isn’t designed to deal with legal issues.

A FOCUS ON RELATIONSHIPS

Gold’s office wall is filled with mementos from family, friends and past clients who have inspired her over the years. Gloria Chun, right, of the Justice & Diversity Center, says assistance from an attorney “is a critical linchpin in keeping people housed.”

COUNSEL from Page 4

for damaging the building, a decrease in the quality of life for other people in the building, being a nuisance for other residents in the building, we don’t believe that the city and taxpayers should fund eviction defense for those instances,” Goss said. “And we also don’t believe that we as taxpayers should fund eviction defense for very wealthy people.” But Gold has observed that the vast majority of those facing eviction are poor or middle class. “There are probably 40 to 50 cases a year that I see where those tenants would not fit within the income guidelines that our agency represents,” she said. “And even for those folks, a lot of them are just outside of our income guidelines, which means they really don’t have the disposable income available to them to be able to hire an attorney.”

LANDMARK CRIMINAL CASE RULING The passage of Proposition F is a step forward in what Chun called the “right to

Alameda County • Eviction Defense Center: 510-452-4541 • Alameda County Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service: 510-302-2222, extension 4 • East Bay Community Law Center: 510-548-4040 • Superior Court Resource Center: sfpr.es/sup-court-resources San Mateo County • San Mateo County Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service: 650-369-4149 • Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County: 650-558-0915 • Landlord-Tenant Clinic (Superior Court): sfpr.es/landlord-tenant-clinic

civil counsel movement,” which includes not only housing, but food, health care and child custody. In legal circles it’s referred to as “civil Gideon,” named for the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Gideon v. Wainwright, which declared that indigent defendants charged with a crime have a constitutional right to an attorney at no cost. Pollock said people often have just as much at risk in civil cases. Since the landmark case, there’s been a slow and steady push to enshrine the same right to representation. “Jail is not some sort of magic dividing line,” Pollock said. “Housing court is a place where people stand to lose so very much.” He listed several potential dire consequences of eviction: job loss, court-ordered removal of a child, being arrested for being homeless, or hospitalization because of a medical condition exacerbated by living on the street. “The idea that these things are somehow less important than going to jail is increasingly hard to stomach in our society,”

Pollock said. Although Preston thinks Proposition F will have “a dramatic impact on reducing evictions,” he points out that while legal representation can help tenants, “it doesn’t mean they win.” “It just means that they actually understand the proceedings and have someone to assist them in presenting their case to a court,” he said. “And if they’ve done something wrong then they’ll lose their case and they’re going to end up evicted, and the right to counsel wouldn’t change that.” Gold is similarly reserved in her hopes for an instant transformation of a city in rapid demographic change. “I don’t think that eviction defense alone is going to make you feel or see a difference in our housing crisis. It’s an important point,” she said. “You want to keep people housed who have affordable housing because they’re in a rent-controlled unit or they’re in subsidized housing,” Gold added. “If those people lose their homes, you’ve just compounded your housing crisis because there’s nowhere for them to go.”

The Community Boards’ approach focuses on relationships.“Not only do you want to get something taken care of, but you want to strengthen the relationship between the people having the dispute,” Garrison told the Public Press. “So in the future they’re perhaps more comfortable talking about a problem, versus holding it back or being passive-aggressive or acting out.” A three-person volunteer panel conducts Community Boards’ mediations. Members are chosen with an eye toward economic, ethnic and gender identity; ideally each aggrieved party will have someone on the panel they can relate to. Amy Farah Weiss, a housing activist and founder of the Saint Francis Homelessness Challenge who ran for mayor this year, has spoken about mediation as one of many pieces of a potentially more humane housing policy. She said she was exposed to mediation practices working at the San Francisco Community Land Trust. She saw clearly that it wasn’t just tenants who lacked options. Landlords with irresponsible renters also needed alternatives to collect unpaid rent and protect their rights and their properties. “It’s oftentimes a mixture of responsibility of why things are going awry,” said Weiss. “This idea of, ‘Oh, the landlord’s a hundred percent at fault or the tenant’s a hundred percent at fault’ … is oftentimes way too binary.”

SUCCESS WITH LIMITED RESOURCES While Community Boards charges a sliding scale fee ranging from $40 to $100, the San Francisco Rent Board’s services are free. And there are several other small programs, run by local nonprofits. All are a bargain compared with the time and expense of a lawsuit. So why isn’t mediation at the top of everyone’s list of solutions? For starters, there are limitations. At the Rent Board, the waiting list is six to eight weeks. Koomas said with more resources his agency could increase outreach to let

the public know about the program and take on a wider variety of cases. Weiss supports the expansion of such programs. “So many issues can be headed off at the pass if there were truly enough accessible and affordable services for property owners and tenants to work through some of these issues,” she said. Community Boards, funded through the California Department of Consumer Affairs, receives 1,200 to 1,400 mediation requests every year but handles only around 100, Garrison said. And while about 85 percent of the sessions end with a shared resolution, “it’s not a panacea,” he added. “We can’t use terms like ‘magic bullet.’” One major catch, of course, is that mediation is voluntary. The raging housing market has made property owners seemingly more likely to pursue eviction rather than resolve issues with their tenants, Garrison noted. “If someone’s invested in property, they have much more at stake now than they would have had even 10 years ago,” he said. To Weiss, her mayoral campaign confirmed that the public is hungry for solutions to the city’s housing crisis. “It’s really important that we make sure we’re doing everything possible to create those pathways for people to successfully stay in their housing,” she said.

HOW IT WORKS IN MADISON Not using mediation for evictions could be a missed opportunity. Every Tuesday, when tenants or landlords in Madison, Wisconsin, arrive at the Dane County Courthouse for eviction hearings, they’re greeted by volunteers ready with information on their options: trial, legal assistance or mediation. Since 1996, the Tenant Resource Center has used volunteer mediators to settle landlord-tenant disputes, many of which have helped stave off evictions. Executive director Brenda Konkel said that more than 90 percent of cases are about nonpayment of rent, and that most agreements end up with payment plans allowing the tenant to stay. “Unless the landlord is mad at you about something else, if it’s just a matter of payments, a lot of times it’s in the landlord’s financial interest to mediate this and have that person stay there,” Konkel said. “The landlord is pretty motivated to try to work this out so they don’t have to do all the work that they have to do to turn over the apartment, and the tenants get more time to kind of figure out how to make those payments.” Konkel said the mediation program has “changed the culture” of the eviction court experience. Landlords familiar with the resource center show up “kind of expecting to come up with some sort of agreement if they can.” In some cases, the tenant agrees to a move-out date, but it’s one “that they know they can make plans for.” “If the tenant can get out on their own, then the sheriff doesn’t have to show up, so they don’t have to pay for that,” Konkel said, referring to landlords. “They don’t have to pay for the movers, they don’t have to pay for all that stuff.” She said her organization mediates about 300 of the 2,000 annual eviction cases in Dane County. It uses two metrics to measure success: 90 percent of those who enter mediation don’t end up in homeless shelters, and 70 percent still have not been evicted within three months after mediation. Like San Francisco, Dane County is facing a housing crunch. So, could the existing mediation programs here also play a bigger role in keeping people in their homes? Weiss said that Proposition F, the voterapproved measure that now guarantees free legal counsel to tenants facing eviction, makes alternatives like mediation all the more important in facilitating a less hostile and oppositional dynamic. “It will prevent lawsuits later down the line and it truly gets at the challenging work of supporting people living in community,” said Weiss. “We want to support the small property owners, because if they decide to sell their property, they usually sell it to the market in a way that’s going to … increase the rent greatly. “Hopefully, having stronger mediation services can be a start to humanizing both sides,” Weiss added. “When we’re talking about small property owners and tenants, there’s so much hatred between the two groups right now.”

IN MADISON, WISCONSIN: Since

1996, the Tenant Resource Center has used volunteer mediators to settle landlord-tenant disputes, many of which have helped stave off evictions.

“If it’s just a matter of payments, a lot of times it’s in the landlord’s financial interest to mediate this and have that person stay there.” — Brenda Konkel, Tenant Resource Center Creative Commons photos

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IN SAN FRANCISCO: The official count of rent-controlled apartments dropped by about 9,000 between 2004 and 2017.

IN OAKLAND: Rent increases are restricted in about 70,000 units, according to a 2016 rent-control audit.

IN BERKELEY: About 20,500 homes are rent controlled. This tally, like others, relies on landlords to self-report.

Aerial photos from Creative Commons

RENT CONTROL from Page 6

Photo by Sharon Wickham // Public Press

A Novel Form of Rent Control limit annual rent increases in the tens of thousands of buildings constructed after 1979.

RENT CONTROL from Page 1

erties a predetermined number of years after construction, covering almost all current and future residential buildings. In other words, when a building hits a specific age, rents on apartments there could rise no faster than the allowed rate — even if they were luxury studios priced at $5,000 per month. Rolling rent control was one of several potential housing solutions candidates raised during this year’s San Francisco mayoral campaign that were aimed at renters, who make up about two-thirds of all households. Although conceptually discussed in political circles for some time, it has received little academic scrutiny or attention from city planners, activists or landlords. Key players are intrigued by it, Landlords but hesitant to give fullvs. throated support. Renters “My view is that all units should be rent controlled,” said Dean Preston, who is executive director of Tenants Together and a candidate for the District 5 supervisor seat that newly elected Mayor London Breed held. “The discussion should be around the details of what that means in different types of markets and different types of housing.” To protect low- and middle-income workers and families from exorbitant increases and illegal evictions, many tenant groups favor expanding rent control immediately, not gradually, to all buildings — this is often called “universal” rent control. Developers and other real estate professionals argue that doing so could reduce the value of properties, and that blow to their profits would disrupt the market and stifle the creation of desperately needed housing. This is where rolling rent control appears to be more workable, Bonta said. Because it would not affect a property’s value for many years, it “allows builders to make rational economic choices to build,” he said. The key local policy choice then becomes the length of time between when a building is built and becomes regulated. A relatively short period could upend existing economic models for real estate investment, developers say. A longer period would be better. For Berkeley’s proposed ballot measure — still being debated when this article was published in July — the rent board was debating a phase-in period of somewhere between 12 and 20 years. To market-rate developers, that’s way off. “Twenty or 30 years is not enough,” said Denise Pinkston of TMG Partners, one of the largest developers in the Bay Area. She serves on the Committee to House the Bay Area, which is crafting a regional strategy to ease the housing-affordability crisis. This is just one example of the gulf between tenant and real estate interests, which will become increasingly pronounced in the run-up to November’s election. Much hangs on the potential repeal of CostaHawkins and the lifting of rent control limits, a fight projected to cost $80 million, the Sacramento Bee reported in June.

SAN FRANCISCO

HOUSING

SOLUTIONS

COSTA-HAWKINS Rent control materialized in California in the late 1970s during a housing crisis similar to today’s. Between 1978 and 1985, more than a dozen cities placed limits on how much rents could rise — the annual allowed rate was generally tied to the regional Consumer Price Index — and

RENT CONTROL NUMBERS TO KNOW

Photo by Garrick Wong // Public Press

Pro bono attorneys help clients with landlord-tenant, real estate and eviction cases on the fifth floor of the Superior Court in San Francisco.

CALIFORNIA CITIES WITH RENT CONTROL LAWS BAY AREA

San Francisco 1979

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Richmond/2016 Berkeley/1980 Oakland/1980 Alameda/2016 Hayward/1979

East Palo Alto/1983 Mountain View/2016 Pacific Ocean

101

Thousand Oaks 1980

West Hollywood 1985

25 MILES

Beverly Hills/1978

880

San Jose 1979 Los Gatos 1980

25 MILES

Pacific Ocean

Santa Monica 1979

Los Angeles/1980

101

10 15

ROLLING RENT CONTROL: BERKELEY

215

Palm Springs 1979

Source: Public Press research

Maps by Reid Brown // Public Press

RENT CONTROL UNDER DISCUSSION: Sacramento Santa Rosa Santa Cruz Glendale

City/Year implemented

Pasadena Inglewood Santa Ana

Long Beach Pomona National City

RENT CONTROL REJECTED (2016):

RENT-INCREASE REVIEW/MEDIATION:

Pacifica Lafayette

Campbell Concord Fremont

San Mateo Burlingame

Gardena San Leandro

Sources: Capital Public Radio, Public Press research

provided eviction protections. The price controls affected only existing buildings. In June 1979, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted its own policy following a citywide rent freeze that spring, when the “problem of rent increases” had “reached crisis level,” as the ordinance states. Berkeley and four other cities — Santa Monica, West Hollywood, East Palo Alto and Cotati, in Sonoma County — adopted the more restrictive “vacancy control,” which curbed a landlord’s ability to increase the rent on an apartment when it turned over.

For more than a decade, landlord lobbyists repeatedly put bills before the Legislature to cut back these laws. State Sen. David Roberti, Senate president for 13 years and a champion of rent control, ensured that they failed. But in 1994, term limits forced the Los Angeles Democrat out. Rent control’s opponents pounced. In 1995, with Democrats controlling both chambers, legislators and Gov. Gray Davis passed the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, sponsored by Sen. Jim Costa, a Democrat representing Fresno, and Assemblyman Phil Hawkins, a Republican

1995

63.2%

1979

San Francisco enacts rent control

State Costa-Hawkins law restricts rent control

S.F. renter-occupied housing

If no new buildings become rent controlled in California, their numbers will gradually drop as owners demolish or move into them, or withdraw from the rental business by pushing out tenants under the state’s Ellis Act. San Francisco Rent Board documents show that, with fluctuations in some years, the city’s official count of rent-controlled units fell by almost 5 percent between fiscal 2004-05 and 2016-17, from about 181,000 units to 172,000. If San Francisco enacted rolling rent control, it is unclear how many units would fall under its purview each year. A precise forecast would require knowledge of every building’s age, and the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder’s Office has not systematically tracked this information. The Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley used U.S. Census Bureau data to estimate the number of buildings constructed in some major cities with rent control. This was part of a May paper that explored rolling rent control and other policy ideas with the potential to ameliorate the housing crisis. Researchers estimated that 32,535 units in San Francisco buildings weren’t rent controlled because they were built from 1980 through the end of 2016, the last year studied. Of those, 10,297 units were built in the 1980s, 6,269 in the 1990s, 9,917 in the 2000s, and 6,052 from 2010 to 2016. If, in 2019, San Francisco adopted a 12-year delay before rolling rent control activated — the lower limit in Berkeley’s proposal — then about 24,000 units would be old enough to become rent controlled immediately. After that, newer units would gradually phase in: A rough average of 850 units would become rent controlled annually, with fluctuations in that rate reflecting the historical pace of construction. And building is still going strong. In 2017 alone, thousands more units were built in the city, according to the Planning Department’s most recent Housing Inventory report. Tens of thousands more are somewhere in the development process, from filing initial permits to construction.

representing Bellflower. The legislation outlawed vacancy control, as well as rent control on single-family homes. More important, it banned any regulation of rents in buildings constructed in later years. That is why Richmond and Mountain View, where voters approved rent control in 2016, limit annual rent increases only in buildings constructed before 1995. Costa-Hawkins also stated that, as of its passage, cities that already had rent caps could not extend them to additional buildings. That is why San Francisco cannot

36.8%

S.F. owner-occupied housing

In Berkeley, the rent board staff estimates that rolling rent control would apply immediately to between 1,106 and 2,000 housing units that were already old enough, and roughly 150 more units each year thereafter, on top of the roughly 20,500 that are already rent controlled. This would occur at a time when the policy’s reach was greatly expanded. Without Costa-Hawkins, rent control would again apply to single-family homes in cities that did not expressly exempt them. San Francisco has such an exemption. Berkeley does not. Rent board staffers said Berkeley’s proposal corrects a flaw in the language of Costa-Hawkins, which, in banning new construction from rent control, defines “new” as anything built after the law’s passage in 1995. Jay Kelekian, executive director of the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board called that definition “absurd.” He and his staff decided that “new” should be a temporary, rather than a permanent, designation. RENT CONTROL continued on Page 7

172,000

Estimated S.F. rent-controlled units (built before 1980)

Berkeley would not be the first jurisdiction to apply rent control in a time-release fashion. This type of policy has existed in New Jersey since 1999, when the Legislature there passed a law exempting new construction from local rent-control regulations for 30 years — the exemption is waived in certain cases in which owners pay off their mortgages sooner. Kelekian’s staff said that, in more than 100 New Jersey cities with rent control, few owners have paid off their mortgages to date. And in the Canadian province of Manitoba, a form of rolling rent control has existed since 1982. Because these policies and housing markets are complex and in many ways unique, it is difficult to draw from their histories to speculate on rolling rent control’s impact anywhere else.

HOW LONG TO PHASE IN? In an effort to craft a rolling rent control policy that avoided disrupting real estate development, Bren Darrow, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board’s staff attorney, and his colleagues interviewed a range of professionals to understand the underlying market forces at play. The team consulted Berkeley’s former housing director, a city planner, developers, and financial and legal experts. They consulted only one marketrate developer, a family friend of Darrow’s. “I was hoping that I could get a no-nonsense perspective from affordable-housing

SAN FRANCISCO APARTMENT UNITS RENT CONTROLLED

MARKET RATE

Built pre-1980 172,000 units (estimated)

1980-89 10,297 units built 1990-99 6,269 units built 2000-16 15,969 units built

204,535 TOTAL

Sources: Terner Center; SF Rent Board; U.S. Census Bureau

WHAT IS COSTA-HAWKINS? The Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, passed by the California Legislature in 1995, constrained cities’ rent-control policies. Costa-Hawkins prevents cities from: • Limiting rent increases in singlefamily homes and buildings constructed after 1995. • Applying existing rent-hike limits to more buildings than were covered when Costa-Hawkins passed. • Telling landlords where to set their tenants’ initial rents.

developers,” Darrow said, “as contrasted with some of the rhetoric that the Planning Department hears from developers of market-rate projects.” The team’s broad takeaway: A building’s revenue potential would decrease when it became rent controlled because the landlord could no longer raise rents to the market rate at any time. Instead, rents could rise no faster than Berkeley’s annually allowed rate, which changes from year to year and was 2.3 percent in 2018. (San Francisco’s latest is 1.75 percent.) If developers knew they would make less money from the sale of a project, Darrow said, they could have a harder time getting financing. They might have to spend more time raising money before beginning construction, or take out more loans, exposing themselves to greater financial risk. This would slow individual projects or spur some developers to build in a different city. An investment adviser told Darrow’s team that a rolling rent control law might be able to shield a project’s initial sale price — and a developer’s profits — if rent control were delayed by more than a decade after completion. That’s because the future buyer would probably intend to sell it later for a profit, and buyers typically run a 10year analysis to weigh a purchase. But there was no magic number of years that would maximize profits in every instance, Darrow found. No two buyers, or projects, are the same. Vacant land is hard to find and projects must often augment

32,535

S.F. rental units built 1980-2016 not rent controlled

or replace existing structures, all of which affect the final cost.

THE 40-YEAR WINDOW Berkeley city staff weren’t the only ones trying to understand how rolling rent control might affect the housing market. The Terner Center staff spoke with their own sampling of more than 30 market-rate developers, lenders and other professionals about rolling rent control. As in Berkeley, their sources enjoyed anonymity. David Garcia, the center’s policy director, weighed in on the city’s proposal. “From all the evidence that we’ve seen and collected,” he said, “that would most likely have a negative impact on new housing coming online in the city.” “No one said that having a date is a nonstarter,” and there was no agreement on a specific number of years, Garcia said. But, he added, “we heard pretty clearly that anything less than 40 is probably going to see slowdown” in construction. That would give the owner a buffer to pay off a standard 30-year mortgage. From a development lender’s perspective, recessions pose a special threat when layered with rolling rent control, Garcia said. That’s because, once the building is finished, rents are the major income source for the owner to repay that money. “The idea is that during the life of your investment you are going to go through at least one, if not two, recessions where rents are going to stagnate a little or in fact decline,” Garcia said. Lower rents help new tenants, but eat into a landlord’s income. Normally, the owner could expect to recoup the loss by raising rents when the recession ends. But if that building becomes rent controlled in the midst of a recession, rents would be locked in for existing tenants. This scenario could endanger a lender’s chance of ultimately being paid in full. To offset this risk, the borrower would be charged a hefty interest rate from the outset. “That is going to greatly increase your cost to financing,” Garcia said, “or a bank might not take that risk at all, or an investor might not take that risk either.” Rolling rent control might also discourage owners from maintaining their properties. “At about 30 years, you’re looking at a complete overhaul of the building’s major systems,” such as electrical, plumbing, flooring and roofing, he said. “All of those things happen by year 30, if not before that.” In addition to that work, which is legally required, the owner may choose not to replace or upgrade windows, carpeting, ventilation systems and lighting fixtures. Oz Erickson, founder and principal of San Francisco-based developer Emerald Fund, echoed the Terner Center’s conclusion, saying that a rolling rent control policy would have to give concessions to developers. For it to work, he said in an email, “there would have to be some absolute, hard-core guarantee that the regulatory entity (county, city, state?) would truly use fast-track approval and that rents would unquestionably be at market for 40 years.” A shorter time frame would drive investors away, said Pinkston of TMG Partners. “Development is risky,” she said. “You could make $10 million, or you could lose $30 million. And if capital can go invest in solar farms or chicken products, or commodities, versus housing, it will.” So far, Berkeley regulations seem to have avoided drying up the housing market. Annual housing production fluctuated widely from 2007 to 2014, but in most years at least 100 units were built, according to the city’s most recent Housing Element. Berkeley’s Housing Pipeline Report shows that 910 units were built from 2014 to last September, at which point an additional 525 units were approved for construction. Across the state, housing construction has generally declined since the 1970s, and this has been true in Berkeley and Alameda County, U.S. Census Bureau data show.

PUBLIC DIALOGUE SHIFTS For nearly two years, Bonta fought to pass Assembly Bill 1506, the legislation to repeal Costa-Hawkins that he co-wrote with fellow Democratic assemblymen David Chiu, representing San Francisco, and Richard Bloom, representing Santa Monica. They tried to entice stakeholders by pitching policies that would become legal in absence of the state law. Bonta floated rolling rent control about 50 times in conversations with tenant advocates, market-rate and affordable-housing developers, he said. “I like to raise it with

34,120

S.F. vacant housing units (2016, rental and owned)

GETTING THE BOOT

arbitrary” about allowing rent control only for properties built by 1995.

Landing an apartment in San Francisco is hard, and keeping it can be a challenge. Since 1997, landlords have filed 39,056 eviction notices, though not all caused tenants to move out. Luckier tenants — rent controlled or not — have negotiated buyouts to help them resettle. Most occurred in the Mission District, ground-zero for gentrification. Citywide, there were 1,879 buyouts between March 2015, when reporting began, and June 2018.

LANDLORDS, TENANT ADVOCATES

EVICTIONS FILED BY MONTH 400

300

200

100

’97 ’98 ’99 ’00 ’01 ’02 ’03 ’04 ’05 ’06 ’07 ’08 ’09 ’10 ’11 ’12 ’13 ’14 ’15 ’16 ’17 ’18

TENANT BUYOUTS PER NEIGHBORHOOD |1,879 total |March 7, 2015 to June 13, 2018 NEIGHBORHOOD

TENANTS BOUGHT OUT

Mission

226 173

Sunset/Parkside Outer Richmond

105

Excelsior

104

Noe Valley

Castro/Upper Market

Pacific Heights

Haight Ashbury

85 77

Bernal Heights Hayes Valley

Marina

Inner Sunset

Inner Richmond

Lone Mountain/USF

Nob Hill

Bayview-Hunters Point

West of Twin Peaks

Potrero Hill

Western Addition

Russian Hill

Visitacion Valley

Oceanview/Merced/Ingleside

35 34

Outer Mission

Presidio Heights

North Beach Portola

South of Market

Glen Park

Chinatown

Twin Peaks

Japantown

Tenderloin

Seacliff

Financial District/South Beach

McLaren Park

Presidio

Lakeshore

Source: June data from the San Francisco Rent Board

Graphics by Reid Brown // Public Press

TYPE OF VACANT UNIT (2016) 34,120 total

policy lens but through a political lens,” Bonta said. “Either it’s a landlord’s property right to be able to build and take the risks as businesspeople in the free marketplace, and turn a profit or rent out units, or it’s a tenant’s fundamental human right to housing.” Recently, rolling rent control has begun to enter the public dialogue. San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the Tenderloin, Treasure Island and South of Market neighborhoods, was the only mayoral candidate in the June election to suggest it as a post-Costa-Hawkins scenario. At a March candidates forum, an audience member asked how they would ensure housing for middle-income residents if elected. “Rolling rent control,” Kim said. She called it “an ideal policy,” conceptually, but she’d like to see additional studies to determine the best phase-in period. Like Kim, Breed has supported repealing Costa-Hawkins and expanding rent control in San Francisco, but she has not publicly addressed rolling rent control. Scott Wiener, a former supervisor who represents San Francisco in the state Senate, has signaled interest. In April he told the Mercury News that Costa-Hawkins needs reform and that there is “something

7,070 For rent 9,788 Other vacant

6,960 • For seasonal, recreational or occasional use 5,961 • Sold, not occupied 2,680 • Rented, not occupied 1,661 • For sale only

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2016 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates

everyone, take their temperature, see what they think.” Bonta said that “probably 90 percent” of those people responded positively to the idea, which admittedly fell outside their publicly declared political agendas. But the prospect of rolling rent control proved inadequate to unite tenant and real estate groups behind AB 1506, which failed in committee in the Democrat-controlled Legislature. “A lot of people see this not through a

2.5%

S.F. rental vacancy rate (2016)

82%

S.F. housing stock built before 1980

But executives at two property-owners’ groups said rolling rent control would be little more than an expansion of flawed local laws that financially burden landlords. Charley Goss, government affairs manager for the San Francisco Apartment Association, criticized rent control for sometimes benefiting “wealthy” renters who “have been able to hold on to their rentcontrol units for low cost.” “I think there’s still something arbitrary about it, as to who it would protect,” he said. “Who should benefit from artificially low rent? I think the intuitive answer is low-income people.” Between 1990 and 2015, an increasing proportion of the city’s rent-controlled units have gone to middle-income earners, according to a 2018 Planning Department analysis that calibrated dollars to 2015 levels. The fraction of tenants earning between 80 percent and 120 percent of the region’s median income ($57,100 and $85,600, respectively, for a single-person household) grew from about 1 percent to 28 percent, data show. Goss would like the city to means-test rent-controlled tenants to identify and exempt people with high incomes from the annual limit on rent increases. If the city did this, he said, rolling rent control might become more palatable to his organization. The association represents about 4,000 landlords, most of whom manage properties with four units or fewer. Means testing also has the support of Noni Richen, president of the Small Property Owners of San Francisco Institute, an organization that advocates for landlords. Affordable-housing advocates are hesitant to support rolling rent control too, because it would leave thousands of tenants in more recently built homes exposed to unregulated rent increases for years or decades. Tommi Avicolli Mecca, director of counseling at the Housing Rights Committee, said his organization had not taken a position on rolling rent control. He would personally like to see universal rent control applied to all properties simultaneously. He said an incremental increase sounded like an unnecessary compromise. “Given that we’re going to have to fight opposition anyway,” he said, “why not fight for what we really need?” Universal rent control is not a radical idea, he added, “given the way that the San Francisco market works and how we always have these booms, and that means that lots of people get evicted — it increases homelessness.” The 2017 biennial Point-in-Time homelessness count found that 69 percent of those surveyed said they had been city residents when they became homeless, and that more than half had lived in San Francisco for at least 10 years. Causa Justa Just Cause, which educates and organizes around housing issues, supports applying rent control immediately to all existing buildings if Costa-Hawkins is repealed, said Leticia Arce, its lead San Francisco organizer. “It would be just unacceptable for us to be unable to pass universal rent control,” Arce said. “What would be the hesitation from the local elected officials, if the voters have spoken so clearly?” Speaking personally, Arce said, if universal rent control failed, she “might be open to negotiating rolling rent control. But it’s really hard for me to even say.” Deepa Varma, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, called rolling rent control “quite a popular idea” and “widely talked about,” but said the organization had not taken a stance. Ultimately, at its heart, the fight over Costa-Hawkins remains a fight over how much cities should be able to control their housing markets. Pinkston said that to her and others in market-rate development, “The fear around the repeal is that it will be left to each jurisdiction to decide what they want to do, and many of them will decide to cover new construction, which is another form of growth control.” Berkeley’s rent board chief said that while he understands these concerns, cities aren’t acting irrationally by considering options to expand rent control. “Those communities have just as great an interest in solving the problem — I’d say a greater interest — than the industry necessarily does,” Kelekian said. An expanded version of this article appears at sfpublicpress.org.

884,363 S.F. population (2017)

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; Terner Center for Housing Innovation; Public Press research

8 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2018

GLOBAL HOUSING CRISIS: Cities around the world and in the U.S. have enacted or are considering various vacancy taxes, including Melbourne, Australia; Paris; Pittsburgh; and Hong Kong.

Creative Commons photos

Cities Turn to Taxes to Discourage Vacant ‘Ghost Homes’ VACANCY TAX from Page 1

Tom Murphy, a former mayor of Pittsburgh, compared the proposal to an approach his city took for half a century: taxing land at a higher rate — at one point close to six times more — than any improvements on the land. “The theory of it was that if you create a penalty for sitting on vacant land, in effect, by having a higher property tax on the land, then it will encourage people to develop their land,” said Murphy, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. The policy was scrapped in 2001 after an uproar among some homeowners over their land assessments. “So that’s essentially what San Francisco is talking about,” he added. “For it to work, it needs to be at some level that is painful rather than a nuisance.”

From left: Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, former San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar and Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who plans a ballot measure in 2019. then they want to tax you for that, too.”

S.F. VACANCIES, WITH CAVEATS

So why are politicians pushing this idea? Are thousands of San Francisco residential properties being kept off the market? Without better data, the second question is hard to answer. The first is clearer. WOULD IT WORK — OR BE LEGAL? The moves appear to have been prompted in part by the SPUR estimate of 30,000 Skeptics question whether taxing vacant vacant units,based on 2012 census data. units would be legal or effective at making That figure had risen to 34,120 more housing available. out of almost 387,000 total hous“The economic impact is going units in 2016, the latest data ing to depend on how many there show. are, and what level of tax will get On its face, that would indicate people to change their behaviors, that vacant units make up almost and whether the tax is legal or 9 percent of the housing stock. not,” said David Shulman, a senior However, the data come with two economist at UCLA Anderson big caveats. First, 9,750 units were Forecast. Depending on how the in transition: either for sale or for law is drafted, he pointed out, this rent, or recently rented or sold kind of tax could be viewed as an with a new renter or owner who Landlords unconstitutional taking of propvs. had not yet moved in. An addierty. Renters tional 7,600 homes were either for Charley Goss, government afsale or sold but not yet occupied. fairs director of the San Francisco That left about 16,700 units kept empty for Apartment Association, likewise quesseasonal or occasional use, a category that tioned whether a vacancy tax would be could include both second homes and units legal. He added that small-property owners deliberately kept empty or unoccupied for who leave units vacant often have legitiother reasons. These units make up around mate reasons, from being burned by bad 4.3 percent of all the city’s housing units. tenants and having to make large payouts Second, the data came from the Census to get them to leave, to keeping units availBureau’s American Community Survey, able for family. which samples a relatively small slice of “The city passes punitive legislation the population and has a high margin of against property owners all the time, many error — around 13 percent for the housingof whom are low income, many of whom unit totals and 24 percent for the vacant come from other countries, many of whom units. Those numbers indicate that vacant are monolingual,” he said. The city’s reguunits that weren’t for rent or sale made up lations and fees and taxes on property ownbetween 1.3 percent and 2.3 percent of the ership “create an inhospitable environment city’s homes in 2016. for them to operate in, which leads some For context, Reis Inc., a commercial real people not to operate in it,” he said, “but

estate data analyzer, put San Francisco’s apartment vacancy rate at 3.2 percent in 2012 and 4.5 percent in 2017 based on its study of buildings with 40 units or more. Condominiums were not included. Those numbers don’t seem to indicate a glut of vacancies, but without data on condos, it’s hard to say definitively.

VANCOUVER’S EXPERIENCE Vancouver faced similar data problems in its effort to tally vacant housing. The city was especially concerned about foreign owners buying second homes and leaving them empty or occupied rarely. In August 2016, the British Columbia provincial government imposed a 15 percent tax on foreign buyers, and weeks later the federal

government tightened mortgage-insurance requirements to further discourage ghost homes. To get a better handle on vacancies, Vancouver commissioned a study of electricity usage that set abnormally low power consumption as a proxy for vacancy. It concluded that 10,800 units were unoccupied for a year or more, resulting in a non-occupancy rate hovering around 5 percent from 2002 to 2014, even as census data showed non-resident occupied units growing by about 50 percent. “A healthy vacancy rate for a city is considered between 3 percent and 5 percent,” said Patrice Impey, a spokeswoman for the city of Vancouver. “What it means is that if somebody comes to your city to rent something, there’s enough choice for them.”

VANCOUVER BY THE NUMBERS Vancouver BRITISH COLUMBIA CANADA

200 MILES

HOUSING

SOLUTIONS

Pacific Ocean

Seattle WASHINGTON

UNITED STATES

Portland OREGON

MONTANA

NUMBER OF UNITS Type of apartment

April 2015

Foreign-born owners buying second homes and leaving them empty was a major factor in Vancouver’s housing crisis. So, in August 2016, the British Columbia provincial government imposed a 15 percent tax on overseas buyers. A city-commissioned study of electricity usage determined that 10,800 units were empty for a year or more, prompting the Empty Homes Tax. Here’s a snapshot of its rental market.

VACANCY RATES Oct. 2015

Oct. 2016

Oct. 2017

Type of apartment

April 2015

Oct. 2015

Oct. 2016

Oct. 2017

Studio

8,655

8,597

8,625

8,907

Studio

1.0%

0.5%

0.8%

0.9%

1 Bedroom

38,107

37,940

38,464

38,507

1 Bedroom

1.0%

0.7%

0.8%

0.9%

2 Bedroom

9,146

9,125

9,406

9,294

2 Bedroom

0.7%

0.9%

1.0%

3 Bedroom +

538

528

523

535

3 Bedroom +

0.2%

0.4%

1.2%

2.4%

56,446

56,190

57,018

57,243

Total

1.1%

0.6%

0.8%

0.9%

Oct. 2016

Oct. 2017

Type of apartment

Total

AVAILABILITY RATES Type of apartment

AVERAGE RENTS (Canadian dollars)

April 2015

Oct. 2015

Studio

1.4%

0.9%

1.4%

1.5%

Studio

1 Bedroom

1.3%

1.0%

1.3%

1.4%

1 Bedroom

2 Bedroom

2.8%

1.0%

1.6%

1.7%

2 Bedroom

3 Bedroom +

0.2%

1.1%

2.4%

3 Bedroom +

Total

1.5%

1.0%

1.4%

1.5%

Total

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Rental Market Survey

April 2015

Oct. 2015

Oct. 2016

Oct. 2017

$966

$982

$1,060

$1,107

$1,154

$1,175

$1,268

$1,326

$1,609

$1,643

$1,757

$1,860

$2,070

$2,105

$2,313

$1,198

$1,233

$1,324

$1,389

Graphic by Reid Brown // Public Press

Between April and October 2015, Vancouver’s already tight vacancy rate grew even tighter, dropping from 1.1 percent to 0.6 percent. So even a slight bump — 0.9 percent last year from 0.8 percent in 2016, according to city data — was cheered as evidence that the market was loosening, thereby increasing available housing. One factor that helped ease implementation of the tax was that the city didn’t use a time-based system that would have required audits of how often a home was in use, Impey said. Instead, homeowners simply must state whether the property is their principal residence. “That allows us to audit based on straightforward things like your driver’s license and government records,” she said. Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced in April that the tax was expected to generate about $30 million (U.S. $23 million) in its first year from 3,300 properties out of about 184,000 total units. Of the 8,500 properties determined to be vacant or under-used, 5,200 were declared exempt from the tax for various reasons, including proof that a unit was being rented out long term, being remodeled or redeveloped, or that the owner works in the city at least six months a year. The highest single tax was $250,000, with a median of $9,900. Proceeds will be directed to housing initiatives. “We brought in the Empty Homes Tax because we want to ensure that housing is for homes first, not just treated as a commodity,” Robertson said in a news release. “With a near-zero vacancy rate, we can’t have homes sitting empty while people who want to live and work in our city are struggling to find a place to rent.” For San Francisco, the questions and answers are less clear-cut. Without better data, officials can’t quantify the scope of the problem or estimate how many units a vacancy tax might free up. And to some observers, the shortage of affordable housing is more of a supply problem than anything else. Since 2010, San Francisco has added more than 78,000 residents, but just over 31,000 housing units. “The solution is not a vacancy tax,” said Shulman of UCLA. “The solution is changing the zoning and building more housing. Everything else is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

IN VANCOUVER: The first year of the Empty Homes Tax was projected to generate about $23 million from about 3,300 vacant or under-used properties.

Wikimedia Commons photo by Mfield

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2018 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 9

S.F. Startup Helps Teachers Buy Homes Closer to Schools By Theresa Harrington // EdSource

s school districts around California scramble to tackle a teacher shortage in the face of rising housing costs, the West Contra Costa school district hopes a new program that offers home down payment assistance will help its efforts to recruit and retain teachers. “This is just one of the innovative opportunities we have worked on to assist our teachers to stay in our communities and continue to help our students thrive,” said district Superintendent Matthew Duffy. “West County, and particularly Richmond, is one of the few places in the Bay Area where homebuying is still relatively affordable.” Through the program, the San Franciscobased for-profit startup Landed will pay half the down payment, up to $120,000 per household, in exchange for 25 percent of the gain in value when the home is sold. At that time, buyers would also repay the down payment. Landed would also bear a maximum 25 percent of any loss in value. The goal of the program is to help teachers with an average salary of $67,000 to buy a home. While the West Contra Costa program is aimed primarily at attracting and keeping teachers, it is open to any district employee Landlords — teachers, administravs. tors, clerical staff and Renters maintenance workers — who commits to remaining employed in the district at least two years and who can contribute at least 10 percent of the down payment. “We know that Landed is just one of many solutions needed to address the housing crisis in the Bay Area, and we are excited to bring this program to the East Bay and West Contra Costa Unified to help keep educators working and living in the communities they serve,” said Landed spokeswoman Nikki Lowy. Demetrio Gonzalez, president of the district’s teachers union, said he lives with three roommates in Point Richmond in a rented home because they can’t afford to buy. He said he may apply for the program,

HOUSING

SOLUTIONS

By Robert Raymond // Shareable

n the shadow of the looming Chevron refinery, and within the spaces between boarded-up storefronts and abandoned lots, something is stirring in Richmond. Residents, organizers and activists have come together to create an incubation hub for community revitalization and resilience. They call themselves Cooperation Richmond, and their aim is to empower the marginalized and exploited residents of this city to build community-controlled wealth and well-being. Founded in October 2017, Cooperation Richmond is plugged into a broader national movement that includes similar initiatives like Cooperation Jackson, in the capital of Mississippi. These initiatives have largely been inspired by the Mondragon cooperatives, a highly integrated network that forms a self-supporting ecosystem in the Basque region of northern Spain. As with these other initiatives, Cooperation Richmond’s mission is to build an economy that puts people and planet before profit. It does this through providing education, coaching, and credit and capital development to cooperative businesses in Richmond. I spoke with Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni of Cooperation Richmond about their work and the importance of the growing movement in Richmond and beyond. Robert Raymond: There’s been a buzz around a new book recently written by Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson, titled “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.” Can you tell us about Cooperation Richmond, what you see as your mission, and how you are connected to a broader cooperative ecosystem that includes, among others, Cooperation Jackson? Gopal Dayaneni: Cooperation Richmond is a really good example of what we call trans-local organizing — autonomist, place-based organizing with a unifying vision, shared strategies, and common frames. We are connected with many other organizations that are doing or supporting cooperative development and that are all connected by a common vision. It’s a movement that is trying to build meaningful infrastructure for economic democracy in order to build a new kind of political power. We want to actually transform the very nature of the economy and of governance in our communities — that’s what we’re engaged in. And so Cooperation Richmond is an organization that we have developed for the purpose of supporting worker-owned and community-owned cooperatives in Richmond, California, which is one of the poorest parts of the Bay Area — a majority people-of-color community. We provide coaching, connections and capital. We’re focused on folks who are most excluded from the dominant economy, folks who we think should be the foundation of building the next economy. Doria Robinson: The idea behind Cooperation Richmond is that we’re taking somebody from a place where they’re just getting started, somebody at the point

IN RICHMOND: East Bay school district partners with a San Francisco startup to assist educators with down payments as home prices rise.

Creative Commons photo by Audiohifi

but stressed that the union’s No 1 priority is teacher raises. “If we were getting paid well, then we wouldn’t have to worry about how to afford a down payment,” he said. “But I think this program is great. It can be another support, I believe.” Landed, founded in 2015, participated in the Y Combinator startup training and also received funds from the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation and financial backing or other support from other angel and venture capital investors, banking executives, former directors of federal housing authorities, affordable housing policy experts, union organizers, philanthropists and Stanford economists. Since then, it has established partnerships with about 50 districts throughout California, including many in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego areas. It spent its first year establishing partnerships with investors and districts, then awarded its first three down payments in fall, 2016, to educators from the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District, Los Altos School District and the Nueva School in San Mateo County. So far, it has helped 48 school or district employees buy homes valued collectively at

more than $26 million. The buyers include teachers, principals and nurses in these districts: Sequoia Union High, Ravenswood City, Redwood City, San Mateo Union High, Redondo Beach, Oakland, Evergreen, East Side Union High, Oak Grove, South San Francisco, Campbell Union and Milpitas. West Contra Costa Unified, a district of nearly 30,000 students, is based in Richmond and serves East Bay communities in western Contra Costa County. The district has hired more than 400 teachers over the past four years but loses about 15 percent a year, resulting in an ongoing teacher turnover problem. To help stabilize the workforce, the school board recently approved a 5 percent teacher raise and is considering budget cuts and a possible parcel tax to help fund future raises to bring teachers’ salaries more in line with those in neighboring Bay Area districts. “Now with Landed,” Duffy said, “we can help make the home-buying process a little easier for our employees and encourage them to stay in our district.” About 100 district employees turned out in April at DeJean Middle School in Richmond for the district’s official unveiling of its cooperation with Landed. The event included representatives from organizations

that provide housing or financial planning assistance, including SparkPoint Contra Costa and the California Housing Finance Agency. Mitzi Perez, a first-year digital arts teacher at Kennedy High School in Richmond, said she is renting from her parents in Richmond but wants to buy a home with her fiancé. “I want to live in an affordable home in the place where I grew up,” said the 23-year-old, who attended DeJean Middle School. “I am a product of the district. I wanted to stay homegrown and to go to one of our most underserved schools. I wanted to make sure that I’d be there for students, but it’s nice to know that there’s something that could help me as well.” She said she needs money for a down payment and signed up to receive more information from most organizations at the event, including Landed. Diana Ortega, a third-grade teacher at Downer Elementary in San Pablo who has worked in the district 18 years, said she commutes 20 to 50 minutes each day from her rented home in Crockett. Ortega said she’s unsure whether she’d pursue Landed’s program. “They basically front you the money, but you would have to agree to share the capital gains,” she said of the down payment program. “I’m thinking, ‘Wow, is it worth it?’ My gut says, ‘no,’ but I may be desperate enough.” Her only other option is to borrow against her pension plan. The Landed program received a major boost last year when the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invested $5 million to help educators in three districts near Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park to buy homes. Subsequently, Landed established the U.S. Educator Housing Fund in partnership with large foundations, such as the Community Foundation Santa Cruz County and a Denver foundation, with the goal of providing down payment assistance to educators in other expensive cities nationwide. The fund is a limited liability company that includes money managed by Landed, Lowy said. “Part of the appeal to foundations is we have a dedicated fund going directly to helping educators,” she said. “And any profits from appreciation when homes are sold goes directly back to the fund, which has allowed us to create an evergreen fund.”

COOPERATIVE ECONOMICS IN RICHMOND Nonprofit launches initiatives to build business partnerships in the community

Photos courtesy of Josue Hernandez and Najari Smith, Rich City Rides

Cooperation Richmond’s pilot project, Rich City Rides, is a bike and skateboard shop that has helped bring the community together. where they really want to make an impact, and they want to take charge of their lives, but need some help making it happen. Maybe they have an idea for a business, but they don’t have much more than that idea. We’ve structured Cooperation Richmond to basically take it from there, to help them take it to the next stage. RR: You launched Cooperation Richmond less than a year ago, but you’ve already played an important role in fostering cooperative workplaces and community engagement in Richmond. Can you tell us about your first initiative? Robinson: Our pilot project was Rich City Rides, a bike and skate shop. It’s a really powerful story. It’s a small bike and skateboard shop in Richmond, a place that had no real bike shop. Before Rich City Rides, if you wanted to do any repairs to your bike, you had to go to Walmart or Target, which are not exactly bike repair places. That was it. You know oftentimes bikes are associated with gentrification, or kind of an elitist kind of thing you do on the weekends. In Richmond, it’s really different. People can’t afford cars. Not a lot of people in lowincome communities have cars, or if they do, their car is constantly breaking down. So they’ll default to riding a bike just to

get to work or just to get to the store, just to go get around. So people actually really needed to have a good place to be able to fix their bike. And so people mostly just threw out their bike if they got a flat — they would literally throw their bike out. It was painful to see. Or it would just sit in the garage once it had something wrong with it, and that was it. There was no access to any kind of bike tools or anything like that — people literally had no way to fix their bikes. So three young men started to run a loosely associated collective bike shop out of different spaces that they could find. They worked out of a storage space for a while, they had a kind of pop-up bike shop going on for a while. They were finally able to get into a retail space across from the Richmond BART station, a space on the main street that had been boarded up for years. Rich City Rides was the first place that really started to revitalize the main street. I think it was one of the only places that’s locally owned on that block as well. But they were really running a pretty substantial business at that point with very little resources, and they needed capital. They also needed a face-lift — the shop looked like somebody’s garage. So we took them on and worked with them to create an action plan to strengthen

the business. We got them their first loan and helped them incorporate as a California cooperative. So now Rich City Rides is leading the effort to completely transform and revitalize the downtown, to create this opportunity for people to have healthy transportation — healthy in terms of environment and in terms of your own body. So yeah, it’s kind of an honor to just see them carry this vision forward. RR: And why is the cooperatives structure important? What role do they play in the broader mission of creating the next economy? Dayaneni: Well, there’s a few different pieces of that. So, the first is that bosses

Although the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has invested in the fund, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have no role in the fund or the company, Lowy said. School district employees can use the program to purchase homes anywhere and are not limited to the school district where they work, she added. “We definitely want educators to be able to use this as a tool to buy something closer to where they work, but we also recognize that everyone’s personal situation is different,” she said. “It has to be their primary residence.” Buyers must agree to work with a designated real estate agent who shares the commission with Landed, but sellers choose their own agents. Homeowners must repay the initial down payment, plus 25 percent of the profit or loss in value, after a maximum of 30 years, Lowy said. If they don’t sell their homes, buyers could refinance to pay back the money or use other available funds. If Landed provides less than 10 percent of the down payment, the percentage of the profit or loss is lower. In one scenario on the site, the housing fund would pay $80,000 toward a $160,000 down payment on an $800,000 home. After several years, if the home went up $100,000 in value to $900,000, the housing fund would get back 25 percent of the appreciation ($25,000) plus its initial down payment ($80,000) for a total of $105,000. If the house lost $100,000 in value, the housing fund would lose $25,000 (25 percent), which would be subtracted from the initial down payment of $80,000, for a total of $55,000 paid back to the fund. Districts are not required to contribute monetarily to the program, but are expected to promote it to their employees, Lowy added. She said California teachers whose districts have not partnered with Landed may be eligible for individual assistance if they live in the Bay Area, or Los Angeles, Orange or San Diego counties. There is no maximum down payment assistance available to individuals, since the fund includes more than $10 million, she said. EdSource is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that researches and publishes news about education in California.

just suck. You don’t need them. All wealth is generated through the work of the living world. Making money off the movement of money is just extraction of wealth from other people. So the idea of all of us being able to voluntarily co-participate and control our own labor to meet our needs — and the needs of our communities — is very important. It’s also important to share that wealth. Creating commons of wealth and commons of resources is a necessary element of the transition that we need to be in. The dominant economy extracts wealth from the living world, and it begins with extracting wealth from our own work. And so in order to both confront that, but also to build a new kind of muscle memory, a knowledge of how to be in the world, to actually practice self-government on a daily basis, we need institutions and infrastructure that can do that. The second part of it is really that cooperatives allow us to do things that the extractive economy won’t do. For example, we would never exclude folks because they were formerly incarcerated — because we don’t believe humans belong in cages. We would never exclude folks based on their status as documented or undocumented because we recognize the border as an enclosure enforced through violence that fragments ecosystems and communities. So we are able through cooperation to actually live our values in a way that is foreclosed upon in the dominant economy, and particularly for those who are most excluded by the dominant economy. Robinson: I think that there’s some really vital things that being in a workerowned cooperative can provide. Democratization of the workplace is something that can’t be underestimated. In a worker cooperative, that’s really run through democracy, folks are voting through each owner having a say in the day-to-day decisions as well as the trajectory of the enterprise. That’s a really big deal, especially in communities like Richmond where power has really been taken out of the hands of the people. This transition of decision-making and profit-making back to the people — the transition of accountability and responsibility — is truly transformative. If you take somebody who has never been in a place where what they do actually matters, where their whole livelihood actually depends on them completely showing up and making decisions — that’s transformative. And then once you start to get a taste of that it spreads and you don’t want to stop. Dayaneni: Like I said earlier, Cooperation Richmond is part of a larger “just transition” vision and process taking place in Richmond, but also in lots of other places in the United States and around the world. The idea is that for there to be meaningful political democracy, there has to be economic democracy. So the idea is not only about creating sustainable livelihoods in the workplace, but also being able to reimagine the very nature of the work that we do and how we do it.

Photo by Robert Raymond // Shareable

Cooperation Richmond co-founders Gopal Dayaneni, left, and Doria Robinson discuss empowering local businesses.

Shareable is a nonprofit news, action and connection hub for the sharing transformation.

10 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2018

Left in the Dark: I Never Knew Mom, Sister Suffered From Depression

Helping Break The Silence

By Tyler Jimenez // San Joaquin Delta College

epression is never easy to talk about, with friends or even family. Depression is something people would rather not bring up. Not speaking up or telling others about depression is something I know all too well. I do not suffer from depression but know several close family members — my mother and stepsister — who do. Both went through depression, and it affected them in different ways. Before I was born, my mother went through a rough divorce with my step sister’s father. After my mom divorced, she had to move out of their home and was forced to raise my sister alone in a tiny apartment in Ripon. Life was Tyler Jimenez not easy for my mom or my sister. Mom was, to say the least, frustrated. She blamed herself for things she didn’t have full control over. My mother believed that she could and should have made her relationship work. That way she could have had a home for my sister instead of an apartment no bigger than a storage unit. These things kept weighing on my mother to the point my sister began to feel it, though at the time she was only 6 years old. She didn’t fully understand why my mother was acting the way she did. My mother eventually sought help after some convincing from my father, whom she married when my sister was about 6 years old. But no matter how many people she saw, or how many different treatments she underwent, nothing seemed to help. At some point, my mom stopped going to see doctors and the therapist. None could help her deal with her symptoms. She decided not to spend the time or money. Nothing changed for at least a few months. One day, one of the windows in my mother’s apartment got shattered when she hit it accidentally while moving a chair. To get it repaired was a bit pricey. But she didn’t want to leave it broken. So mom decided to learn how to fix it. A person at work taught her how to switch out glass. (This was before the internet had ASK.com.) After a few days and a few failures, my mother put in a new window. More importantly, with that success, my mother discovered a new feeling about herself. She felt proud and she felt accomplished. It was the first time in so long that my mom felt good. So she decided to do more work around the house. She started off small, painting rooms, rewiring some lights. That kind of thing. Then she moved to bigger projects like tearing out tile to put in carpet. Her work on the house continued to feed her sense of pride and accomplishment. It wasn’t a way for my mother to cope with her depression. Rather it was her way of overcoming it. This was exactly what she needed: to overcome her own demons. However, while my mother was discovering her own treatment, unbeknownst to her, her daughter began to experience depression.

MY SISTER BLAMED HERSELF After the divorce, my sister saw my mother go through depression and didn’t understand why she changed. Why she always seemed angry or didn’t want to talk to her own child as much. A feeling in my sister grew and developed. She felt she wasn’t good enough for my mother, and the reason my mother was always upset was because of her. It wasn’t that way at all, but my mother never told my sister what she was going through. As a young girl, my sister tried to figure it out herself. She arrived at her own conclusions: that she wasn’t what my mother wanted. That’s when my sister changed. She started putting all her effort into school and helping my mother, as a way to prove her worth. But my mother thought — since she had started working hard around the house — that my sister was doing well at home and at school. Far from it, though my mother couldn’t have known. But she never asked. Years later, when my sister was in high school and I was in third grade, I’d always thought of my sister as a straightA student, physically strong, talented and my parents couldn’t have been prouder of her. But problems from this perfect girl slowly began to surface. My sister was constantly — if not every day — sick in some way. Some days she would totally skip sleeping and then avoid people. My parents tried to take my sister to a doctor, but she wouldn’t budge. All they could do was watch as my sister slowly got more and more fragile. It wasn’t until my sister’s first year of college that she finally snapped. She dropped out of college. To my parents’ surprise, she attempted suicide. She survived only because my father was home that day.

n early 2018, students and faculty of the Communications and Fine Arts Department at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton partnered with Ethnic Media Services and a consultantevaluator from the Stanford University School of Medicine on a storytelling project to break the silence about depression on campus. Meeting in weekly workshops over an intense 10-week period, the students — who ranged in age from 19 to 60 — developed and conducted a survey of 158 fellow students, worked on multimedia projects to document their own and others’ experiences, compiled their own recommendations for the college and presented a campus forum on May 15 to share their results. When Sandy Close, director of Ethnic Media Services, asked me to help her on this storytelling at a community college, all I knew was that there were more reports of severe depression in this population than at four-year colleges. The chance to work with Sandy and gather insight on an illness that affects many young people I know, had me signing on. At first, the participants seemed incongruous; a disparate group held together by the thin threads of our persuasion. But by the third meeting, the dam burst. “Trapped in our own personal hell,” said one, “Like being caught in a feedback loop,” said another. Being vulnerable and lonely was a common theme. And when a participant asked the question — what is normal? — the stories poured out. I realized then that we had a compelling project. As the weeks progressed, this resilient group of Delta students came together to create an exceptional collection of stories that illuminated the burdens of depression. These are a few of their stories. To read them all, visit deltabreakthesilence.org. — Jaya Padmanabhan, director and editor, Break the Silence

Illustration by Vanessa Lerma-Felix // San Joaquin Delta College

She was taken to the hospital where, after tests, they diagnosed her as depressive and put her on suicide watch. My sister was silent during the first few weeks she was out of the hospital. I can’t imagine what was going through her head. When my sister turned 19, she moved out of our house and lived in an apartment. Life didn’t get easier for her. She went through tough jobs with horrible schedules. Three bad relationships and two divorces. My parents always checked up on her to see how she was doing. She was just living, going to work, then home, repeat. My sister is 29, and only now am I seeing things turn around for her. She has a good job, a nice home, but, more importantly, she is discovering that feeling my mother had when she began to heal. Last year our family went to Tahoe and she came with us. There she and my father hiked up a mountain trail. I don’t know what she saw or felt that day. But since then she has been hiking on trails every week. This summer she plans on going on a multi-mountain hike. I asked her why she was doing this and what drove her to do it. She told me she wants to find herself. She wants to find what she wants beyond the streets of stone and towers of metal. My sister is looking for peace, and, I believe, that like my mother, she will find it. It’s hard to think of your family undergoing hard times. I never knew about my mother and sister’s depression til I was 18. I was surprised and upset that, unaware of my own sister’s pain, I gave her a hard time some days when we lived together. I wanted to tell their story for those who don’t want to speak up and for those who have done everything under the sun, yet still can’t find inner solace. This is something that you can conquer, that you can beat.

The Unwanted Roommate Living Inside My Head This other Dawn does have her good days By Dawn L. Basnett // San Joaquin Delta College

have a roommate whose name also is Dawn. She is extremely ruthless and I can’t stand it. As a matter of fact, I can’t stand her. I don’t like her but nonetheless she does in fact live with me and there isn’t much I can do about it. She’s always there; always spying on me. For some unknown reason, Dawn seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable to put her 2 cents into everything I do or say. Don’t get me wrong now, sometimes she’s quite helpful, but that’s a Dawn Basnett rarity. Here’s the kicker: This lady doesn’t pay rent, utilities, or even her fair share of the grocery bill. “Tell her to move out,” you might say. Yeah, that seems like such a simple and obvious solution. Not so simple however when you take into consideration that she lives within my own mind. No, I don’t have split personality disorder. And no, she doesn’t have a different voice. She has the same exact voice as me. Only hers is bathed in negativity. Our names and living space truly are the only things we have in common. Dawn has been my roommate my whole life. She has this knack for recording every single negative thing that has ever happened in my life and using it at the most inconvenient times. Dawn has meticulously stacked up all of these ‘‘not so happy’’ memories of mine to a point that my mind is cluttered. I have this blouse that I really love and

absolutely felt beautiful in every time I wore it. That is, until the day when someone thought I was pregnant. I was horrified. They immediately apologized and said that it must be the blouse. But the damage was done and I never wore it again. To this day that blouse hangs in my closet wanting to be worn. Unfortunately, every time I consider wearing it, Dawn brings that memory up and pipes right in, “You’ve gained at least 10 pounds since you last

Illustration by Dawn L. Basnett

wore it. You’ll for sure look pregnant now!” Yeah, thanks for the reminder Dawn. In 2010 I had a stroke. It took me a very long time to be able to drive again. I still suffer from vertigo and bump into walls occasionally while walking. I can drive now, but only around town or on some of the country roads. I try to drive on the freeway and have in fact done it, but it is a nightmare. The entire time I’m driving Dawn

will constantly tell me that I’m a danger, that I’m going to kill myself or someone else, and how I can’t do it. For the longest time Dawn and I lived however she dictated. Until one fine day when I finally got sick and tired of dealing with the consequences of listening to her advice and admonitions; of allowing her to control my life. So now I get to see this very helpful therapist, who hasn’t once gazed over my shoulder at the clock (if she does, then she’s really quite subtle about it), about once a month, which seems to be sufficient. During our sessions we do a lot of role playing, which I have found to be quite helpful because it puts me into hypothetical situations while maintaining a safety net. She has taught me some very good techniques for breathing properly when I’m feeling anxious, she listens attentively, and she has an amazing ability to gently guide me along as she teaches me to remain on the path that leads me toward the facts and reality, instead of allowing the other Dawn to continue leading me astray. What I’ve come to realize about Dawn is that she is just a scared little girl. And while I can’t actually get rid of her, I can certainly be the adult in the relationship. Even though she is the unwanted roommate, I’m beginning to realize that she may in fact prove useful to me at some point along our journey. I figured that since she’s so darn good at organizing events and memories, perhaps I should cross-train her. Therefore, I am currently cross-training Dawn to search out all of the ‘‘Happy Memories’’ of my life, of which there are plenty. For a longer, unedited version of this story, go to deltabreakthesilence.org.

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2018 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 11

A Mother Tells of Her Son’s Long Struggle With Schizophrenia

By Heidi Echols // San Joaquin Delta College

By Ianthe Chase // San Joaquin Delta College

An excerpted conversation between Ianthe Chase and a mother whose son has had lifelong issues with depression and schizophrenia. She requested anonymity. Read the full interview on deltabreakthesilence.org. Q: How old are your children? A: My son is 37. I have a daughter who is 38 and another daughter who is 23 years old. Q: How old was he when you noticed that there was something different? A: I’m going to say he was 15. I saw that he wasn’t doing well in school. Also he wasn’t grasping concepts. Q: What did the depression look like? A: Sometimes anger, sometimes sadness. Sometimes I saw that he just didn’t want to get out of bed. Ianthe Chase

Q: How did he get along with your other

Photos by Taylor Wicks // San Joaquin Delta College

children? A: As they got older, maybe there was a little strife between my oldest daughter and him. Even today their relationship is strained a bit. I don’t know if it’s because of his illness.

One student photographer’s take on several forms of depression. Clockwise: “The Shake,” “The Smile,” “Labelling,” “Addiction.”

Q: Did you seek a mental health specialist when he first became ill? A: I tried, but it was hard to get him to go. Q: How did you go about finding someone? A: Well, because with mental health, when your child is under the age of 18, you get a social worker, you get a psychologist and you get a psychiatrist. Q: So, who did you call first? A: Well, first I called Mental Health (a facility), which was basically, “If you can get him down here then we can help him.” They had some really good people. But this is what I had to do finally since the day I walked into his room and he said, “I want to kill myself, I want to kill myself.” He had a belt, and he had a plan. He meant it. He was just so depressed. At that point I got him into a facility in Modesto. Q: An in-home care facility? A: No, it was a psychiatric hospital where he stayed for maybe about a week so that they could get a diagnosis on him. Q: How was he doing while he was in the facility? A: Not good, not good. Not good at all. Not good, because he thought nothing was wrong with him, and, honestly, I, too, thought these doctors are wrong. They’re not right. Q: Was he on any kind of medication at that point? A: Nothing. No medication, and as I got to talk to more psychiatrists and psychologists they came up with the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Q: How did it affect your marriage? A: It was difficult. It was very difficult because there was no one answer. We didn’t know how to react, what to do and him not being med-compliant, because he needed the meds. Well, initially I was in denial. Total denial, total. Like, I mean, this is not happening. For the first 10 years, I was still, like, no. This is just not right. This is the wrong diagnosis. He doesn’t have this problem. Q: So, after 18, when he was out of the home and he was living in a couple of different facilities, when do you think it finally dawned on him that he needed to pay attention and focus? Has he come to that realization yet? A: Yes, but you know what, Ianthe? I would say from the age of 17 when I went to his room and he was suicidal, I think it took him about 10 years to realize that he needed the medication, because when he was off his medication he always felt worse.

Illustrations by Celine Pham // San Joaquin Delta College

No Longer Feeling Ashamed and Afraid Asian lesbian uses art to express herself, support LGBTQ community By Celine Pham // San Joaquin Delta College

Q: Is he still very much a part of the family? A: Yes, I would say that denial is someplace you could go, but you can’t live there. Not just that, but you have to love your child no matter what or who they are. But it’s hard, because like I said, it’s like a death. Q: A part of him? A: Yeah, of the person you thought he was going to be, maybe; you thought he was going to go to college. That’s no longer that person. Q: How does your son’s schizophrenia manifest itself? A: He hears voices. The medication can help, but he can’t turn them off. Q: Is it talked about in the Muslim community? A: Not really. It’s just not addressed, and I’ve been wanting to address it within the community, not just because of my son but because it’s like there’s a belief that this doesn’t happen in our community. This doesn’t happen to our race. It happens to anyone and everyone no matter your socioeconomic background, no matter your race or religion.

School Provides Me Some Solace, Helps Ease the Pain a Bit

LIVING AND COPING WITH DEPRESSION

magine going home every night from school feeling angry, sad, alone and empty. Everywhere you look, strangers, loved ones and peers are being themselves, confident in their own skins. Imagine looking into the mirror and not liking what you see of your own reflection. Others seem comfortable, even proud of who they are. But who are you? How can you be proud of yourself when you do not know who you are? That was how I felt. That was me, Celine. But all along, I did Celine Pham know deep inside who I was. I couldn’t face it, because I was terrified of the reactions and opinions of my loved ones. I let society’s norms control my life and shape me, because I was afraid to admit to myself and the people I love that I am a lesbian. In my Asian Catholic home, same-sex marriage was looked down upon. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people were objects of humor, of ridicule, to the straight people around me. My family and friends did not take LGBTQ people seriously. I did not want to be looked

down upon or laughed at. So, I pretended. This made me depressed. I felt alone and empty. I did not know anyone from the LGBTQ community that I could talk to. There was no help at my middle school or high school for LGBTQ counseling. I poured myself into my art. I would spend hours after school working on graphic design ideas. Other kids were doing drugs, I escaped inside Adobe

Photoshop. In art, you’re judged by your originality, not by society’s norms. I came out in my junior year of high school. My family had a period of adjustment, but now they have accepted who I am. Initially, I felt like my family thought this was a “phase.” I think they didn’t understand because they’re not me. It’s different to be a support system for friends, but entirely different when it is a close family member. I understand that. In college, I had a better sense of who I was. Who was that person staring back at me in the mirror? Did I know that person? I could finally look at that reflection and answer yes to those questions. Today, I try to be strong for others who do not have a voice because they are also afraid. I try to be strong for the LGBTQ people who were heartlessly murdered in Orlando, Florida, at the Pulse nightclub shooting. I am afraid that my death may be caused by an LGBTQ hate crime. I don’t feel comfortable using the restrooms at school, nor do I feel safe in this society. I am always cautious of negative comments about my appearance, even though I know it comes from a lack of knowledge of what it means to be LGBTQ. Sometimes I do not realize how different I am until someone points it out, because being in my own skin now feels so normal.

t began when I was 19, and my mother, Barbara, also bipolar, threw me out of the house. With nowhere to go, I ended up on the streets of San Francisco, scared and alone. That first day, I met Michael, who was into getting high. He wanted some money, so he got me my first “date.” I continued accepting dates more so I could feed his habit and stay connected to him. Michael got me to try a hit of crack. It fed my loneliness and depression, and soon I was addicted. Living on the street I had many near-death experiences. I had guns and knives pulled on me, I was kidnapped and experienced sexual violence many times. One day, I decided I’d had enough and called my grandparents, Ken and Lynn in Idaho, and luckily, they sent for me. I rejoined my family, got clean, got a job and an apartment, and I was Heidi Echols doing well. I aspired to be a truck driver and soon realized my dream after moving back to California. But I became depressed when I realized I wasn’t doing well at my job. I was in a relationship at the time with James, always fighting with him, so my mom took me to a doctor who diagnosed me as being bipolar. My relationship with James soon ended because he couldn’t handle the stress of my ups and downs. One day, driving cross country, I met Ray, another truck driver. We hit it off and he started riding with me. I was still struggling with depression despite the medicines. Sadly, Ray got me started on getting high again, and quickly I was back on a destructive path. I became suicidal one day behind the wheel, and when I told my doctor, he took me off driving. During this time I had two apartments and lost them both to my addiction. At the moment, yes, I’m homeless and sleeping on a friend’s couch. But I’m hoping the discipline of coming to school will help pull me up so I can get an apartment. My name has come up on the Section 8 waiting list, and if I get approved I will be getting an apartment in the next few months. I’m not being treated by any psychiatrist, since my Humana insurance is not accepted by my psychiatrist. My primary care doctor doesn’t want to give me my mental health medications, so every day I wake up depressed and experience the pain of my feelings till the moment I fall asleep. And what do I do to escape? I get high, I sell myself, and I take the forks on a road that a “normal” person would not. School provides me some solace. It gives me something to do with my day and that helps ease the depression a bit. But after I leave the campus, it hits me again, and I go around town and think and think, getting lost in my own head. I don’t have a magic answer or know how my story will turn out. All I know is that if you are depressed, I sincerely hope you get help. Reach out to someone who can help you help yourself. Don’t follow in my footsteps — this is no life for anyone. As for me, I won’t quit trying. I will continue to come to school, and I will find a psychiatrist or a doctor to help me, give me medications and suggest coping techniques. I know I’m a fighter and a survivor. It never gets easier, but somehow, I will manage to deal. I’m a 46-year-old community college student, struggling with bipolar depression, drug addiction, prostitution and homelessness. This is my fourth attempt at attending college. This time, I refuse to give up.

WHERE TO GET HELP • Bay Area Suicide and Crisis Intervention Alliance • Alameda County 800-309-2131 or 510-420-2460 • North Bay 415-499-1100 or 415-499-1193 • San Francisco 415-781-0500 or 415-984-1900 • San Mateo County 650-579-0350 or 650-579-0359 • National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 800-273-8255, or text 838255 • Know the Signs 800-273-8255 • Mental Health America Text MHA to 741741 (24/7, free) • National Helpline (U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) 800-662-4357 English and Spanish • The Trevor Project (LGBTQ) 866-488-7386 • California Youth Crisis Line 800-843-5200 (text/talk/chat) • Veterans Crisis Line 800-273-8255

12 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2018

S.F. DEMOCRATS DIVIDED: TWO CITY HALL FACTIONS An analysis of legislative actions by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the late Mayor Ed Lee confirm a long-observed political phenomenon: Though all are Democrats, they fall into measureable progressive or moderate camps. Coordinates show politicians’ ideological sweet spots within larger comfort zones, where they may land in response to specific issues. Positions are relative — omitting one would slightly shift all others. Those farther left are more ideologically progressive, and those farther right more moderate. Note: There were insufficient data to map Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who was appointed in January 2018 to replace interim Mayor Mark Farrell. CURRENT SUPERVISORS Aaron Peskin

John Avalos

FORMER SUPERVISORS AND LATE MAYOR ED LEE David Campos

Eric Mar

POLITICIAN'S COMFORT ZONE Jane Kim

Hillary Ronen

Sandra Lee Fewer

PROGRESSIVE

Norman Yee

London Breed

Jeff Sheehy

IDEOLOGICAL CONTINUUM

Source: Roll-call votes from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, as well as mayoral actions on legislation, from 2015 through May 1, 2018 Analysis by Scott MacKenzie, Cheryl Boudreau and Chris Elmendorf, University of California, Davis

IDENTIFIES AS PROGRESSIVE Ahsha Safaí

Malia Cohen

IDENTIFIES AS MODERATE Ed Lee

IDENTIFIES AS NEITHER Julie Christensen

Mark Farrell*

Katy Tang

Scott Wiener

MODERATE * Placement of interim Mayor Mark Farrell based only on his votes as a supervisor. Graphic by Reid Brown // Public Press

Mapping City Hall’s Political Divide By Noah Arroyo // Public Press

AIRBNB REVEALS RIFT

Creative Commons image by Flickr user Mark

London Breed, then-president of the Board of Supervisors, at the 2018 Cherry Blossom Festival in Japantown. The neighborhood is in District 5, which she used to represent.

IDEOLOGICAL GROUPINGS To map San Francisco’s politicians, the UC Davis team applied a method of statistical analysis pioneered by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who charted the forces influencing the voting behavior of members of Congress. They were able to account for the “vast majority” of the millions of votes over the previous 200 years, they wrote in their 1997 book, “Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting.” The model made some assumptions, including this crucial one: When faced with competing options, a politician will vote for the policy that seems to best align with his or her set of political and personal values. That choice is often between the status quo and a proposed legislation, meaning that a vote against the legislation is the same as a vote in support of the status quo. Poole and Rosenthal observed that politicians repeatedly formed voting coalitions that, though flexible, contained repeat members. When they applied this model, they found that the sequence of politicians reflected an ideological continuum — the most liberal member was on one end, followed by decreasingly liberal members, and then moderates, and then increasingly conservative members. The model presumed that politicians’ choices are sincere. Of course, sometimes a politician will strategically support something he or she doesn’t like in exchange for a colleague’s support on something else. But this can be risky. Strategic votes that are severely out of character will attract press attention, becoming fodder for criticism and endangering re-election. And the complexity of a choice can make a politician’s sincere decision appear otherwise. For example, the immediate choice might be between a legislation’s unpopular initial version and an amended version that

would easily pass if put to a vote. A politician who preferred the amended version to its predecessor, but preferred the status quo to either, would actually vote against the amendment. Politicians can also make mistakes, voting for the option that does not align best with their values. This can happen when a policy’s outcomes are difficult to project, or when choices are so similar that they are largely indistinguishable from each other.

COMFORT ZONES For its analysis of San Franicisco, the UC Davis team looked at 394 votes in which at least one supervisor disagreed with the rest. The Board of Supervisors’ many unanimous votes were disregarded. “If you ask a bunch of 12th-graders what 2 + 2 is, you’re probably going to get the same answer from them,” said UC Davis professor Scott MacKenzie, who collected and analyzed city voting data with colleagues Cheryl Boudreau and Chris Elmendorf. “And that’s not going to tell you much about the differences between those 12th-graders.” Unanimity can also result from extensive deliberation over controversial issues. The team was able to map Lee by analyzing instances when he sponsored, vetoed, or signed legislation that the board passed. They excluded instances when Lee withheld his signature but did not veto because it “suggests the mayor does not fully approve of the board’s action, but declines to make an issue out of it,” MacKenzie said. If they had coded this behavior as an expression of approval, Lee woud have fallen farther left along the continuum. In other words, many of the unsigned bills were favored by progressives. People who voted more frequently in the same direction landed nearer each other on the continuum. For example, former Supervisor Eric Mar voted slightly more with

The faction with the majority of board seats can drive policy, with major consequences. There may be no better recent example than the fight over regulating Airbnb and other short-term rental companies. By spring 2014, a one-day snapshot showed 4,798 properties listed on Airbnb in the city, according to a data-scraping firm hired by the the San Francisco Chronicle. Hosts were in violation of the city’s law banning home rentals for periods shorter than 30 days. For about one-quarter of listings, hosts appeared to be renting to guests more than 10 times per year. Supervisors and housing activists said the ballooning industry was changing the city’s culture and making homes unavailable to long-term renters, worsening the housing crisis. The Board of Supervisors passed a law requiring the hosts to register with the city. When few complied, the moderate and progressive factions put forth competing legislation in 2015 to rein them in. At the time, Breed was president of the moderatemajority board, so that faction handily killed the progressives’ proposal and passed its own. A more progressive mayor might have vetoed the regulations, which were more lenient to Airbnb and its hosts. But Lee — also a moderate, based on the UC Davis analysis — signed them in short order. The moderates also shot down a separate amendment by progressive Supervisor David Campos to require Airbnb and its competitiors to submit quarterly reports on hosts so scofflaws could be identified and fined. It became clear in 2016 that the new regulations were also ineffective. Campos put forward legislation to fine companies $1,000 per day, per listing by unregistered hosts. Peskin’s re-election had put progressives in control. Breed added her support, and the remaining moderates followed suit. The legislation passed with 10 votes, a veto-proof majority; Farrell recused himself because of his ties to the industry. Short-term rental companies sued, but later settled, agreeing to provide frequent reports on their hosts so that the city could verify it was following the rules — similar to Campos’ failed 2015 amendment. Airbnb’s operations in San Francisco had thrived under the moderates’ regulations, and its listing reached about 10,000 in August 2017. The progressives’ more restrictive measures caused the company’s listings to drop by about half. Breed said her support for tougher Airbnb regulations

was not a political reversal, just a response to new information. The moderates’ original law had proven ineffective and needed tightening.

BREED STRADDLES THE DIVIDE And that might be true. Or maybe this was one of many examples where she tried to blur her association with the moderate camp, possibly for political advantage. When her board colleagues chose her to be president in 2015, three years after her election to office, she openly rejected the label. “I am not a moderate,” she said in her acceptance speech, “I am not a progressive. I am a San Franciscan through and through.” The next year, when she backed the progressives’ regulations on short-term rentals, she was also locked in a campaign to keep her seat as District 5 supervisor against Dean Preston, an attorney and executive director of the statewide group Tenants Together. He lost to Breed and is now running to unseat her appointed successor. Breed’s alliance with the progressives complicated the widely held belief that Preston was the more liberal candidate. If her strategy was to sway self-identified liberal voters, it apparently worked. After defeating Preston, she again challenged the moderate label in an interview with Hoodline. Why? Possibly because it carries an implied connection to other, fraught elements within the broader political narrative — the influence of the real estate and tech industries, as well as former Mayor Willie Brown, on San Francisco’s identity and future. But MacKenzie said the UC Davis team’s analysis makes it clear where Breed lies on the ideological spectrum. “She votes as a moderate,” MacKenzie said. “There’s not much question about that. She’s very comfortably to the right of all of the self-identified progressives on the board. And it’s kind of hard to distinguish her from Ed Lee in terms of her voting record.” An earlier version of this article and other stories about the recent mayoral race can be found at sfpublicpress.org/election2018june.

san francisco public press

CROSSWORD PUZZLE SOLUTION FROM PAGE 2

Campos than with Kim. To determine politicians’ comfort zones, the team took 1,000 samples of random subsets of votes, used each one to plot a new continuum, and recorded how much each politician’s position varied across continuums. The greater someone’s variance, the wider the zone. Narrower comfort zones generally resulted for politicians who served longer, because they produced more voting data for the UC Davis team to analyze. This made it easier to pick out anomalous behavior.

44 page st., suite 504 • san francisco, ca 94102

hen media outlets and pundits have argued that local officials were politically progressive or moderate, it mostly was based on observation and conjecture. But now, in San Francisco at least, such assertions are buttressed with data. In partnership with the San Francisco Public Press, UC Davis faculty analyzed almost 3,400 choices that 16 recent San Francisco supervisors and the late Mayor Ed Lee made during nearly 400 votes and legislative actions. Using an approach applied to members of Congress for decades, the researchers then mapped where those politicians fell ideologically, relative to each other, revealing two political factions that have long battled to craft city policy. Though she has eschewed the tag, newly elected Mayor London Breed rates as a political moderate. Based on a progressiveto-moderate ideological scale, she falls nearer the progressives than any other moderate — Breed is between District 7 Supervisor Norman Yee, significantly farther “left,” and former District 8 Supervisor Jeff Sheehy, slightly to the “right.” To no one’s surprise, Supervisor Jane Kim, who was one of Breed’s main rivals to fill out Lee’s term, resides firmly on the progressive side of the continuum. Supervisor Aaron Peskin was rated as the most progressive, or left-leaning, of the supervisors included in the analysis, while former Supervisor Scott Wiener, now a state senator, was rated the most moderate, or right-leaning. Breed’s voting behavior, while representing District 5, implies that she can be something of a swing vote, bridging the divide between other moderates and the progressives. She has a wider ideological “comfort zone” — the degree to which she appears willing to deviate from her sweet spot — than any other longtime board member. We published those findings in the leadup to the June vote. Now we break down how the researchers came up with their rankings. Congressional analyses have produced national liberal-to-conservative continuums, but the UC Davis team used different labels to reflect local parlance and San Francisco’s generally liberal bent. Everyone analyzed is a registered Democrat. Supervisors were mapped based on their actions while serving on the board from 2015 to May 1, 2018. An analysis of votes from a different time period might yield different positions. There were insufficient data to map Supervisor Catherine Stefani, whom Supervisor Mark Farrell appointed to fill his District 2 seat when he became interim mayor in January, weeks after Lee died.

Mayor Breed has rejected both moderate and progressive labels