Issue 26

independent

nonprofit

in depth

ENVIRONMENTAL & RACIAL JUSTICE

Green Gentrification: Who Actually Benefits?

Greenspaces in new developments can improve health and the environment, but they affect communities differently. | 6 SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG • $1.00

WINTER 2019 • ISSUE 26

PROPOSITION B

PROPOSITION C

S.F. Expanding Digital Privacy Protections Is weaker government transparency a potential trade-off?

By Andrew Stelzer // Public Press

I Photo by Michael Winter // Public Press

New regulations could compel firms like Skip to provide services to San Francisco customers without first collecting their data.

n the wake of the Cambridge AnalyticaFacebook scandal, and a steady barrage of new data breaches, the public has been clamoring for tighter regulation of their personal information. At the heart of the tech industry, Bay Area residents are often the guinea pigs for startups, with unknown and unpredictable side effects.

On Nov. 6, San Francisco voters approved what supporters say will be the toughest data-protection policy of any U.S. city, even going beyond California’s landmark Consumer Privacy Act.

Proposition B, which passed with 57 percent of the vote, will cover data collected both by government agencies and by any private entity doing business with the city — from Facebook, Google and Uber, all the way down to a bike shop, toilet-paper supplier or street vendor.

The city administrator will draft the policy in the next few months, which will then be shaped by input from the Board of Supervisors, the public, privacy advocates, and major technology and business interests. The implementing legislation must be PROP B continued on Page 4

Homelessness Aid May Exceed City Projections Voter-approved business-tax increase could greatly expand housing and services

By Noah Arroyo // Public Press

WHO SURVEILS THOSE WHO

SURVEIL US?

I

n the lead-up to the November election, arguments about San Francisco’s Proposition C hinged on a few key numbers, such as homeless people who would be helped and projected long-term job losses resulting from a tax increase on the city’s largest businesses.

Seemingly conflicting figures made it difficult for voters to assess potential costs and benefits of the measure, which promised to roughly double current spending on housing, SOLVING shelters, health care HOMELESSNESS and social services to prevent homelessness.

In the end, the measure passed easily, with 61 percent of the votes — but not enough to prevent it from being sucked into a legal challenge over whether such tax hikes need two-thirds approval.

The day after the election, City Controller Ben Rosenfield said his office would collect the new revenue but not allow it to be spent until courts settle the legality of the homelessness levy and a similar tax increase voters approved in June.

The city attorney argues that this type of tax measure needs only a simple majority to pass. But the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and commercial property owners have sued to keep the city from implementing the June measure, which also did not receive two-thirds voter approval.

If Proposition C stands, it would create enough tax revenue to provide housing and social services in more than 100,000 instances over the next decade, based on a

Public Press analysis of internal government documents, as well as interviews with policy experts and a chief architect of the measure.

The research, published the day before the election, yielded three key findings: ••City officials and Jennifer Friedenbach, who co-authored the ballot measure, calculated its potential impact by dividing the projected tax revenue by the average cost per client for various PROP C continued on Page 10

Photo by Judith Calson // Public Press

The new funds could pay for additional temporary shelter beds, giving residents of tent encampments somewhere to go.

Veritas, S.F.’s Largest Landlord, Sued Over Alleged Efforts to Evict Tenants

By Liza Veale // Public Press

S

everal hundred sharply dressed real estate professionals made their way down a hall of the Fairmont hotel from a Champagne reception to an award ceremony in late September that celebrated Yat-Pang Au, CEO of Veritas Investments Inc., the largest residential and commercial landlord in San Francisco. The Northern California real estate community bestows its “Spirit of Life Award” during an annual fundraiser for its philanthropic beneficiary, the cancer researchLandlords and-treatment center vs.

City of Hope. Veritas Renters donated $25,000 in 2018.

But before the guests were seated and Au received his accolade, about 25 protesters filtered through a side door to pay their own tribute to Au: They brandished a “Spirit of Greed, Eviction and Harassment” trophy while

HOUSING

SOLUTIONS

How Oakland Privacy Advocates Have Pushed Back on Snooping Author Cyrus Farivar says communities can hold tech, government accountable for overreach.

The Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission checks agencies using surveillance technology. | 3 Photos by Sharon Wickham // Public Press

singing their pointed rendition of “Killing Me Softly,” the 1970s hit song by Roberta Flack.

Guests took in the scene awkwardly, some trying not to laugh, before security shepherded the protesters out of the Nob Hill landmark that has hosted notable business, social and political events since 1907.

“Veritas is the biggest example of a kind of real estate business that depends on harassment and eviction in order to be profitable,” said Brad Hirn, of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, one of the organizers of the action. Hirn said that the statewide Proposition 10, which sought to repeal state restrictions in the 1995 Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, represented the first step in undermining what he characterized as the company’s business model.

“The incentive to pressure tenants to leave is created by ‘vacancy decontrol,’” said Hirn, referring to the statutes that allow landlords to charge much higher, market-rate rents in regulated buildVERITAS continued on Page 9

EDUCATION

MORE HOUSING COVERAGE

YOUTHS SPEAK UP: Students take charge to question city school board candidates. | 5

SHAKY FOUNDATION? Claims about rent control derived from incomplete research. | 10

RETOOLING: As charters make inroads into traditional public schools,

BIG MONEY REDUX: Foes of S.F. homelessness-aid tax funded 2016 tent ban. | 11

debate intensifies over equality and measures of success. | 8

POLICING THE STREETS: Business districts accused of harassing homeless. | 12

BAYVIEW SQUEEZE: New KIPP charter shares space inside Malcolm X Academy. | 8

FOOD, NOT RULES: New state law complicates efforts to freely feed the hungry. | 12

FOLLOW US @SFPUBLICPRESS · NO ADS · DELIVERED BY BICYCLE · PARTNERS IN THIS ISSUE:

2 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019

OUR MEMBERS DONORS WHO CONTRIBUTED BETWEEN $35 AND $5,000 IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS MEDIA REFORMER AND PUBLISHER MEMBERS: The Cindy and Eric Arbanovella Fund • Patricia Bovan Campbell • David and Megan Cohn • Credo Restaurant • Donald M. Davis • Kari Gray • Jake Donham and Katherine Hodge • Derek Kerr • Lila LaHood • Michael LaHood and Elizabeth Pontikes • Patricia and Rowland Rebele • Laurie Schecter • Peter Scheer • Corey Stoll • Judith and Stephen Stoll Family Fund EDITOR MEMBERS: Lee Azus • Norman Clevenger • Edward and Yukari Franzwa • Lawrence Groo • Marge Harburg • Richard and Sarah Hardy • Oliver Hickman • Don H. • Jerry Cain and Scott James • Anthony King • Christine Chapon and Alan Korman • David Cay Johnston and Jennifer Leonard • Mack Lundstrom • Victor Makras • Nate Parsons • Lydia Chavez and Mark Rabine • Susan Stark • Ann King Somerville and Zach Stewart • Mona Tekchandani • Lawrence Wilkinson • Tom Honig and Louise Yarnall • Julia Young COLUMNIST MEMBERS: Susan Adams • Barbara and Richard Asche • Laurie Barkin • Emily Beaver • Jean Bogiages • Larry Bush • Umbreen Bhatti and Kaizar Campwala • Richard Champion • Lloyd and Theresa Colombini • Richard DeLeon • Ronald Fisher • Neal Gorenflo • Marquita Bedway and Alger LaHood • Jennifer Loomis • Christin Evans and Praveen Madan • Charley Marsteller • Leslie Guevarra and Richard Pestorich • Amy Resnick • Michael Schaps • Karen Schulkin • Yves Averous and Marc Smolowitz • Glen Van Lehn and Teresa Welborn BEAT REPORTER MEMBERS: Anonymous • Michele Anderson • Peter Barnes • Stella Barton • Berit Baumberger • Keri Bourzac • Bruce and Jean Brugmann • Anna Budayr • Jennifer Cray • Kevin Davis • Phyllis Deets • Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher • Deirdre English • Liz Enochs • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • Moritz Fliedner • Jon Funabiki • Julia Gallyot • Gregor Gentschev • Birgitte and Art Gilliland • William B. Grant • Catherine Hagan • Sue Hestor • Marguerite Hutchinson • Adnan and Amy Iftekhar • Guy Johnson • Ambika Kandasamy • Joshua Koltun • Dr. Matthew Kuchta • DONATE NOW Gina Lagomarsino • Vicki Leidner • Marie Libeson • Online: sfpublicpress.

Jeffrey Johnson and org/membership Jaime Lockwood Mail: San Francisco • Harold Looby • Public Press, 44 Page Robert Lowrey • St., Suite 504, San Andy Lynch • Roger Francisco, CA 94102 Macdonald • Daphne Call: 415-495-7377 Magnawa • Vee Mahoney • Pat May • Kevin and Pamela McKean • Betty Medsger • Mark and Sara Meltzer • Geri Migielicz • Holly Million • Herbert F. Mintz II • Carmen Monedero • Miranda Morris • David Keenan and Alice Mosley • John and Sara O’Neill • Lea Park • Jill Patton • Fran Petris • Deborah Quick • Patrick Reilly, Esq. • Kristina Rizga • Stephen Sagar • Joseph Gratz and Dinah Sanders • Doniece Sandoval • Pamela Satterthwaite • George Koster and Carol Savary • David V. Johnson and Victoria Schlesinger • Reiko Ando and Eric Schoenman • Jane Shabaker • Michael Siani-Rose • Stephen Silha • P-R Stark • Ivy Marsh and Frank Stoll • Peter Sussman • Eric Talbert • Diane Tate • Lisa Tehrani • Tina Chiu and Jonathan Toma • Kimberly Christensen and Richard Tsai • Joe Vassallo • Luis Villa • James Wheaton • Jamie Whitaker • Stacy Wolf • JoAnn Yates • Ellen Zhou • Scott Zimmermann CUB REPORTER MEMBERS: Arienne Adamcikova • Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel • Holly Allen • Jean Amos Katia Asche and Matt Rocker • Joyce AshizawaYee • Cristina Azocar • Mark Backman • Jake Barlow • Nina Barron • Rita Beamish • Charles Belov • Louis Bryan • Lisa Burger • Raymond Buscemi • Camille Campbell • Pete Carey • Justin Chen • Darren Choi • Linda Christenson • Chris Clayman • Bradley Cleveland • Julie Connery • Aaron Cowdin • Jonté Craighead • Catherine De Heer • Judy and Thomas Dunworth • Empower Together Consulting • Alexia Aubault and Joe Eskenazi • Lisa Galli • Max Garrone • Deborah Gordon • Roma Guy • Dan Harder • Elyce Haut • Thomas Hayden • Amanda Hickman • Frank Holland • Peter Hosey • Maryann Hrichak • Amy Huang • Lewis Hurwitz • Karina Ioffee • Bill Barry and Joan Jacobson • Jeffrey Johnson • Jo Ellen Kaiser • Yukari Kane • Leslie Katz • Diane Keaton • Dorothy Kidd • Jordan Klein • Carolyn and Richard Knee • Rosa Lara-Fernandez • Erika Lawson • Dhyana Levey • Jean Lindgren • Zak Long • Donna and Marty Mackowski • Sasha Magee • Eduardo Martinez • Brian McKeever and Janet Monaghan • Laura Moorhead • Jo Marie Munnich • Mabel Ng • Terry Norbury • Henry Norr • Mary Catherine O’Connor • Organize! Training Center • Cherilyn Oshiro • Kylie Owen • Jennifer and Jerome Perarnaud • Yvonne Pingue • Dolores Piper • Rebecca Pontikes • Michael Poplardo • Jason Prado • Clare Prowse • Elizabeth Rapp • Karen Rodgers • Glenn Rogers • Rebecca Rosen Lum • Debra Derickson and Leslie Rosenbaum • Richard Rothman • San Francisco Public Library • Rahmin Sarabi • Elizabeth Schiller • Felisa Preskill and Zachary Scholz • Henrike Siemen • Ryan Singel • Jackson Solway • Tom Stites • John Swartley • Jason Tester • Timothy • Sarah Tribble • Giselle Velazquez • David Watterson • Rina Weisman • Steven Weiss • Leon Barnard and Shinwha Whang • Brenda White • Bruce Wolfe • Sonya Worthy • Danny Yadegar • Yao Yue NEWSIE MEMBERS: Anonymous • Kevin Adler • Justin Allen • Sunny Angulo • Yosh Asato • Stephany Ashley • Susan Atwood • David Baker • Brigitte Bakr • Justin Balenzuela • Marcia Basalla • Arrigo Benedetti • Josh Benjamin • Zachary Benjamin • Jonathan Berkeley • Christopher Berry • Chirag Bhakta • Leigh Biddlecome • Meredith Blasingame • Christopher Block • Anne Bluethenthal • Terezie Bohrer • Eugenia Bowman • Es Braziel • David Brewster • Victoria Brill • Bob Burnside • Lyndal Cairns • Ann Campbell • James Campbell • Lage Carlson • Chris Carlsson • Caroline Caselli • Mark Champion • Nick Chapman • Doria Charlson • Tina Chiang • Maya Chupkov • Laura Close • Alison Cohen • Cameron Conaway • Daniel and Molly Cooper • Karen Coppock • Joseph R. Coriz • K. Bartholomew and A. Cramer • Jennelle Crothers • Rossana Cuéllar • James Custer • Catherine Degraw • Avni Desai • Jon Diamond • John Diehl • Emmy Diep • Peter Dragovich • Rishika Dugyala • Carlee Duncan • Charles Durrett • Scott Ellsworth • Adam Elman • Jim Enochs • J.R. Eppler • Alice Estrup • Dawn Evinger • Aron Faegre • Kevin Fagan • Ted Fay • Julienne Fisher • Ken Fisher • Allegra Fortunati • Amanda Fried • Jennifer Friedenbach • Christian Gainsley • Anya Gandelman • Daren Garshelis • Jeff Gibson • Marisa Giller • Gail Gilman • Francisca Gilmore • Mark Glaser • Judy Goddess • Cole Goins • Jonathan Goldman • Francine Goodwin • Nato Green • David Greene • Justine Gubar • Priya Gupta • Delphine Halgand • Steven Hendrix • Olivia Henry • Christopher Heriot • Patrick Hillas • Jay Hirschton • Christopher Ho • Brant Houston • Susan Hutchison • Vivian Imperiale • Cecil Jack • Anil Jacob • Linda Jue • Lisa Kadyk • Joel Kamisher • Patrick Kennedy • Laurel Kilgour • Brendan Kirkpatrick • Angela Knotts • Stephen Koch • Jeff Kositsky • Joanne Ladolcetta • Monica Lam • Jennifer Lane • Robin Larsen • June Lin • Linda Linn • Joanne Liou • Genevieve LucasConwell • Susannah Luthi • Lauren MacGuidwin • Patrick Maley • Eric Mar • Edward Mason • Nina Rose Mayer • Marianne McCarthy • Paul McCarthy • Robert McClure • Erika McDonald • Peter McElroy • Rob McLean • John McManus • Mechanics’ Institute • Michael Melez • Matt Menezes • Lora Menter • Natalie Metzger-Smit • Andrea Carla Michaels • Sarah Minick • Brenna Moorhead • Virginia Moorhead • Natasha Morris • Prashanth Mundkur • Jesse Nathan • Alicia Neumann • Genevieve Nowicki • Amy O’Hair • Marianne Oest • Uzuri Pease-Greene • Christopher Perrius • Jillian Pfund • Veronica Pitbladdo • Frank Ploof • Megan Prelinger • John Purdie • Robert Rogers • Barbara Roos • Beth Rosales • Jocelyn Ross • Yassen Roussev • Bill Ruck • Caroline Sayre • Maritza Schafer • Adam Schweigert • Joseph Sciarrillo • Eleanor Selfridge-Field • Kai Seymour • Jeff Shaw • Sheryl-Lyn Shelley • Jenna Simon-Halai • Guybe Slangen • Hitesh Soneji • Danny Spitzberg • Denise Stavis Levine • Ande Stone • Brad Straw • Chris Sulots • Dana Taylor • Christian Taylor • David Tejeda • Ruth Thomas-Squance • Adrian Tirtanadi • Julie Trachtenberg • Lenine Umali • Christian Utzman • Peter Vahle • Mark Valentine • Charlotte von Hemert • Eileen Wampole • Rob Waters • Clare Watsky • Mary Whitten • Joshua Wilson • Joseph Wirt • David Zebker • Olga Zilberbourg

FROM THE EDITORS

Journalism and the Arc of Social Justice

W

e honestly didn’t expect the issue of homelessness in San Francisco to find resolution anytime soon. But this fall, with November’s passage of Proposition C — the business tax that could generate as much as $300 million a year for housing and homeless services — we saw the search for solutions jump off the pages of newspapers and into the real world.

Over the last year and a half, the Public Press has returned again and again to investigating broken systems for providing housing and social services. We have explored creative ideas from community members who are bent on solving the ongoing humanitarian crisis on our streets.

Our recent efforts started in summer 2017, when we reported that lack of capacity was straining the city’s “navigation center” shelter model, which aimed to break down tent encampments and move people into permanent homes.

Then that fall, we published a package of stories exploring solutions to homelessness, in the run-up to a day-long conference in January where we gave the stage to community leaders proposing ideas for opening up more housing, improving medical treatment for people living on the streets and reconnecting people with families.

The cover story in our solutions issue revealed data about the shockingly high vacancy rate in single-room occupancy hotels, which our reporters found could — if rented and refurbished by the city —

house more than 40 percent of the people sleeping on the streets. This November, that edition of the paper won awards for community reporting and graphic design from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

The investigative story, by freelance reporter Joe Eskenazi, was so widely read and influential that its findings were circulated in the June 2018 mayoral election, as candidate Mark Leno made filling those rooms the top plank in his political platform. Two other candidates echoed that idea on the campaign trail.

The problem of homelessness is multifaceted, and so we continued to report on broken systems that receive little public scrutiny over many months. Last spring we examined programs that send homeless families to apartments outside of San Francisco, and found that a lack of follow-up made it unclear whether the

Tweet from Josh Stearns, Director, Public Square Program, Democracy Fund

program had succeeded at its ambitious rehousing goals.

When we started this reporting, we never had a specific policy agenda to push, other than responding to the feedback of several hundred Public Press members, newsletter subscribers and social media fans who said homelessness and the housing affordability crisis had left them feeling disempowered. More than anything, San Franciscans want to know how they can help.

Proposition C, a grassroots initiative, was controversial to be sure. Mayor London Breed and other prominent politicians opposed it, and they were joined by vociferous tech titans suspicious of wasteful bureaucracy. But after the measure’s success at the ballot box, conversation moved quickly to how the city could get to work making the most effective, accountable use of existing and expanded funding.

The Public Press, as regular readers know, does not do advocacy journalism.

We don’t make endorsements, and we don’t tell people how to vote. Yet we are encouraged that a problem that has victimized so many poor and infirm people, and scared and saddened some of those lucky enough to have homes, is finally at the forefront of public policy — and that San Francisco is no longer ignoring its most heartbreaking inequity.

Michael Stoll, Executive Director Lila LaHood, Publisher

SAN FRANCISCO

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 Winter 2019 • Issue 26 (Vol. 9, No. 3) Published November 16, 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

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Michael Stoll

PUBLISHER Lila LaHood

DIRECTOR OF MEMBERSHIP & COMMUNITY Daphne Magnawa

SENIOR EDITOR Michael Winter

TAKE TWO

ASSISTANT EDITOR Noah Arroyo

Crossword by Andrea Carla Michaels

ACROSS 1. Track competitor 6. Jive or Twist 11. Short winter month?

14. Mythical peace goddess 15. See 45Down 16. Medium for Van Dyck or van Gogh 17. Actress who once said, “I am a marvelous house- keeper.

Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.”

19. Suffix with pay or schnozz 20. Sending to the canvas, in boxing 21. Moves like lava 23. Patronized a pizzeria 25. Deadly African insects 29. Mount Olympus residents 31. Adjust accordingly 32. Reject, as an accusation 33. John who performed at Prince Harry’s wedding 35. Colorless gas 37. Baseball fans’ delights, and a literal hint to 17A, 25A, 52A and 60A 42. St. ___ Girl (German beer) 43. Ponder, with “on” 45. Un-PC computer?

48. Some soft drinks 51. Filled with self-importance 52. Musical with the songs “I Want to be Happy” and “Tea for Two” 55. Piece loving org.?

56. “I haven’t the foggiest” 57. Andrew Wyeth model 59. Sch. in Terre Haute, Ames or Pocatello

DIRECTOR OF DESIGN

60. Comical character in “Star Wars” films 66. Nonverbal communication, for short 67. Atlantic or Pacific 68. At the acme 69. “Super Mario Bros.” console 70. Abominable Snowmen 71. Like a hornet DOWN 1. Broadway’s”Les___” 2. April 15 initials 3. Gave, as secret documents 4. Auto pioneer Ferrari 5. Take a makeup exam 6. Unyielding 7. “I ___ Rock,” Simon and Garfunkel hit 8. Catch red-handed 9. Stand-up comic Margaret 10. Words before corn 11. Lulu 12. Girl in a Dexys Midnight Runners hit 13. Chic 18. Archaeological handle 22. Yesterday’s buzz 23. Improve, as wine or cheese 24. Tattled 26. Campaign governmental proposal 27. Graf ___ 28. Sicilian smoker 30. Slight trace 34. Steph Curry’s org.

36. Roulette bet 38. Brasi who “sleeps with the fishes” 39. Musk who proposed the Hyperloop

HyunJu Chappell // Magna Citizen Studio

GRAPHIC ARTIST Reid Brown

WRITERS

Nathan Collins Yesica Prado Andrew Stelzer Liza Veale Rob Waters

PHOTOGRAPHERS Judith Calson Sharon Wickham

PARTNERSHIP EDITOR Michele Anderson

COPY EDITORS Richard Knee Dean Takehara

CONTRIBUTORS

SOLUTION on Page 11

40. Fabric leftovers 41. Speak drunkenly 44. Airport alternative to JFK 45. With 15 across, plains dweller 46. Fluffy chocolate dessert 47. Invalidates, as a marriage 49. Coen and Hawke 50. Ending for hip or mob 53. “But there is ___ in Mudville...”

54. Jostle 58. Actress Lollobrigida or Gershon 61. Serena serve, sometimes 62. AARP’s R 63. “___ Ho” (Academy Awardwinning song from “Slumdog Millionaire” 64. Comic Keystoner 65. Clancy novel staple

INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORTERS

The San Francisco Foundation is an incubator for community investment, original ideas and passionate leadership in the Bay Area. One of the nation’s largest community foundations in grantmaking and assets, it has been the primary funder of the Public Press since 2009. sff.org

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. knightfoundation.org

craigslist Charitable Fund provides millions of dollars each year in grants to hundreds of partner organizations addressing four broad areas of interest: environment and transportation; education, rights, justice and reason; non-violence, veterans and peace; and journalism, open source and the Internet. craigslist.org/about/charitable

Cyrus Farivar (Habeas Data) Pendarvis Harshaw (Bay Nature) Emeric Kennard (Bay Nature) Amber Manfree (Bay Nature) Andrew Perez (MapLight) Phillip Reese (Bay Nature)

CROSSWORD CONSTRUCTOR Andrea Carla Michaels

WEB EDITOR John Angelico

BUSINESS, OPERATIONS, AUDIO & WEB PRODUCTION

Stacy Bond • Kevin Davis • Amanda Hickman Linda Jue • Aaron Kingon • George Koster Carla Laser • Ellison Librian Megan Maurer • Bill Schwalb Jeff Shaw • Josh Wilson Garrick Wong

PARTNERS FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE 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

Bay Nature

Bay Nature connects the people of the San Francisco Bay Area to our natural world and motivates people to solve problems with nature in mind. baynature.org

MapLight

We seek to achieve a government that (actually) works for the people. maplight.org

Jonathan Logan Family Foundation Empowering world-changing work. jonathanloganfamilyfoundation.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

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 Fund for Investigative Journalism supports investigative reporting projects around the world. fij.org

The James Irvine Foundation’s mission is to expand opportunity for the people of California. irvine.org

OTHER PUBLIC MEDIA & CIVIC PARTNERS AlterNet CALmatters California Health Report The Center for Investigative Reporting Center for Public Integrity Commonwealth Club of California Earth Island Journal EdSource El Tecolote Ethnic Media Services Grist KALW Radio KPFA Radio KQED Radio Mission Local National Radio Project Public Policy Institute of California Richmond Confidential Richmond Pulse San Francisco Neighborhood Newspaper Association Shareable World Affairs Council

WHERE TO BUY THE NEWSPAPER SAN FRANCISCO

34 Trinity Arts & News, 34 Trinity Place Aardvark Books, 227 Church St. Adobe Books, 3130 24th St. Alexander Book Company, 50 Second St. Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St. Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St. Book Passage, San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, #42 Books Inc., Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave. Books Inc., Marina, 2251 Chestnut St. The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St. Borderlands Cafe, 870 Valencia St.

Browser Books, 2195 Fillmore St. Christopher's Books, 1400 18th St. Church Street Groceteria, 300 Church St. City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Ave. Dog Eared Books, 489 Castro St. Dog Eared Books, 900 Valencia St. Farley's, 1315 18th St. Faye's Video, 3614 18th St. Fog City News, 455 Market St., Suite 125 The Grand Newsstand, 40 Market St. Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St. Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave.

The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St. Heath Newsstand, 2900 18th St. Juicy News SF, 2181 Union St. Mollie Stone's|Pacific Heights, 2435 California St. Nick's Newsstand, 1A Sansome St. Pirate Store at 826 Valencia, 826 Valencia St. San Francisco Public Press, 44 Page St., Suite 504 Smoke Signals, 2223 Polk St. West Portal Daily, 36 West Portal Ave.

EAST BAY

De Lauer's Super Newsstand, 1310 Broadway, Oakland

De Lauer's Super Newsstand, 1412 Park St., Alameda Diesel, A Book Store, 5433 College Ave., Oakland Farley's East, 33 Grand Ave., Oakland Issues, MacArthur Annex, 644 40th St. #102, Oakland Pegasus Books, Rockridge, 5560 College Ave., Oakland Pegasus Books, Solano, 1855 Solano Ave., Berkeley

PENINSULA

Compass Books, SFO Terminals 2 & 3 Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park Mac's Smoke Shop, 534 Emerson St., Palo Alto

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 3

“The connection between race and surveillance and policing has become more evident to people.

It seemed like Oakland was in a good position to create some good examples. To think about how the introduction of technology would affect not just privacy, but equity and fairness issues.”

— Deirdre Mulligan, professor and privacy law advocate

WHY PRIVACY NEEDS ALL OF US Oaklanders, alarmed at law enforcement and corporate overreach, push back

An excerpt from “Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech” (Melville House, 2018)

By Cyrus Farivar

T

here is one American city that is the furthest along in creating a workable solution to the current inadequacy of surveillance law: Oakland, California — which spawned rocky road ice cream, the mai tai cocktail, and the Black Panther Party. Oakland has now pushed pro-privacy public policy along an unprecedented path.

Today, Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission acts as a meaningful check on city agencies — most often, police — that want to acquire any kind of surveillance technology. It doesn’t matter whether a single dollar of city money is being spent — if it’s being used by a city agency, the PAC wants to know about it. The agency in question and the PAC then have to come up with a use policy for that technology and, importantly, report back at least once per year to evaluate its use.

The nine-member all-volunteer commission is headed by a charismatic, no-nonsense 40-year-old activist, Brian Hofer. During the PAC’s 2017 summer recess, Hofer laid out his story over a few pints of beer. In the span of just a few years, he has become an unlikely crusader for privacy in the Bay Area.

I

n July 2013, when Edward Snowden was still a fresh name, the City of Oakland formally accepted a federal grant to create something called the Domain Awareness Center. The idea was to provide a central hub for all of the city’s surveillance tools, including license plate readers, closed circuit television cameras, gunshot detection microphones and more — all in the name of protecting the Port of Oakland, the third largest on the West Coast.

Had the city council been presented with the perfunctory vote on the DAC even a month before Snowden, it likely would have breezed by without even a mention in the local newspaper. But because government snooping was on everyone’s mind, including Hofer’s, it became a controversial plan.

Some of the original and continuing members of the privacy commission: Brian Hofer, Deirdre Mulligan, Raymundo Jacquez, Reem Suleiman, Saied Karamooz After reading a few back issues of the East Bay Express in January 2014, Hofer decided to attend one of the early meetings of the Oakland Privacy Working Group, largely an outgrowth of Occupy and other activists opposed to the DAC. The meeting was held at Sudoroom — then a hackerspace hosted amidst a dusty collective of offices and meeting space in downtown Oakland.

Within weeks, Hofer, who had no political connections whatsoever, had meetings scheduled with city council members and other local organizations. By September 2014, Hofer was named as the chair of the Ad Hoc Privacy Committee. In January 2016, a city law formally incorporated that Ad Hoc Privacy Committee into the PAC — each city council member could appoint a member of their district as representatives. Hofer was its chair, representing District 3, in the northern section of the city. Hofer ended up creating the city’s privacy watchdog, simply because he cared enough to do so.

O

n the first Thursday of every month, the PAC meets in a small hearing room, on the ground floor of City Hall. Although there are dozens of rows of theaterstyle folding seats, more often than not there are more commissioners in attendance than citizens. While occasionally a few local reporters and concerned citizens are present, most of the time, the PAC plugs away quietly. Turns out, the most ambitious local privacy policy in America is slowly and quietly made amidst small printed name cards — tented in front of laptops — one agenda item at a time.

Its June 1, 2017, meeting was called to order by Hofer. He was flanked by seven fellow commissioners and two liaison positions, who do not vote.

The PAC was comprised of a wide variety of commissioners: a white law professor at the University of California, Berkeley; an African-American former OPD officer; a 25-year-old Muslim activist; an 85-year-old founder of a famed user group for the Unix operating system; a young Latino attorney; and an Iranian-American businessman and former mayoral candidate.

Professor Deirdre Mulligan, who as of September

RILEY V. CALIFORNIA (2014) In a unanimous opinion, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts lambasted the the state’s claim that searching a cell phone was “materially indistinguishable” from simply searching someone’s pockets.

2017 announced her intention to step down from the PAC pending a replacement, is probably the highestprofile member of the commission. Mulligan is a veteran of the privacy law community: she was the founding director of the Samuelson Clinic, a Berkeley Law clinic that focuses on technology-related cases.

“The connection between race and surveillance and policing has become more evident to people,” she told me. “It seemed like Oakland was in a good position to create some good examples. To think about how the introduction of technology would affect not just privacy, but equity and fairness issues.”

For his part, Robert Oliver tends to sit back — his eyes toggling between his black laptop and whoever in the PAC happens to be speaking. As the only Oakland native in the group, an army vet with a computer science degree from Grambling State University, and a former Oakland Police Department cop, Oliver comes to the commission with a very unique perspective. When uniformed officers come to speak before the PAC, Oliver doesn’t underscore that he served among them from 1998 until 2006. But he understands what a difficult job police officers are tasked with, especially in a city like Oakland, where, in recent years, there have been around 80 murders annually.

“From a beat officer point of view, who doesn’t have the life experience — and of course they’re not walking around with the benefit of case law sloshing around in their heads — they’re trying to make these decisions on the fly and still remain within the confines of the law while simultaneously trying not to get hurt or killed,” he told me over beers.

T

he way he sees it, Riley v. California is a “demarcation point” — the legal system is starting to figure out what the appropriate limits are. Indeed, the Supreme Court does seem to understand in a fundamental way that smartphones are substantively different from every other class of device that has come before.

Meanwhile, Reem Suleiman stands out, as she is both the youngest member of the PAC and the only Muslim.

A Bakersfield native, Suleiman has been cognizant of what it means to be Muslim and American nearly her entire life. Since Sept. 11, 2001, she’s known of many instances where the FBI or other law enforcement agencies would turn up at the homes or workplaces of people she knew.

“It felt like a prerequisite as a Muslim in America,” she told me at a downtown Oakland coffee shop.

After leaving home, Suleiman went to the University of California, Los Angeles, to study, where she also became a board member of the Muslim Student Association. After graduation and moving to the Bay Area, she got a job as a community organizer with Asian Law Caucus, a local advocacy group. She quickly realized that a lot of people, including her own father, take the position that if law enforcement comes to your door, you should help out as much as possible, presuming that you have nothing to hide.

Suleiman would advise people: “Never speak with them without an attorney. Ask for their business card and say that your attorney will contact them. People didn’t understand that they had a right to refuse and that they [weren’t required] to let them enter without a warrant. It could be my father-in-law. It could be my dad, it was very personal.”

This background was her foray into how government snooping could be used against Muslims like her.

“The surveillance implications aren’t even in the back of anybody’s heads,” she said. “I feel like if the public really understood the scope of this they would be outraged.”

I

n some ways, Lou Katz is the polar opposite of Suleiman: he’s 85, Jewish and male. But they share many of the same civil liberties concerns. In 1975, Katz founded USENIX, a well-known Unix users’ group that continues today — he’s the nerdy, lefty grandpa of the Oakland PAC. Throughout the Vietnam era, and into the post-9/11 timeframe, Katz has been concerned about government overreach.

“I was a kid in the Second World War,” he told me over coffee. “When they formed the Department of Homeland Security, the bells and sirens went off. ‘Wait a minute, this is the SS, this is the Gestapo!’ They were using the same words. They were pulling the same crap that the Nazis had pulled.”

Katz got involved as a way to potentially stop a local government program, right in his own backyard, before it got out of control.

“It’s hard to imagine a technology whose actual existence should be kept secret,” he continued. “Certainly not at the police level. I don’t know about at the NSA or CIA level, that’s a different thing. NSA’s adversary is other nation states, the adversaries in Oakland are, at worst, organized crime.”

Serving alongside Katz is Raymundo Jacquez, a 32-year-old attorney with the Centro Legal de la Raza, an immigrants’ rights legal group centered in Fruitvale, a largely Latino neighborhood in East Oakland.

Jacquez’s Oakland-born parents raised him in nearby Hayward with an understanding of ongoing immigrant and minority struggles. It was this upbringing that eventually made him want to be a civil rights attorney.

“This committee has taken on a different feel postTrump,” he said. “You never know who is going to be in power and you never know what is going to happen with the data. We have to shape policies in case there is a Trump running every department.”

A s of late 2017, the PAC’s most comprehensive policy success has been its stingray policy. Since the passage of the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, California law enforcement agencies must, in

Photos by Sharon Wickham // Public Press

“The surveillance implications aren’t even in the back of anybody’s heads,” says Reem Suleiman, Oakland PAC. nearly all cases, obtain a warrant before using them.

But the Oakland Police Department must now go a few steps further: As of February 2017, stingrays can only be approved by the chief of police or the assistant chief of police. (In an emergency situation, a lieutenant or above must approve.) In either case, each use must be logged, with the name of the user, the reason and results of each use. In addition, the police must provide an annual report that describes those uses, violations of policy (alleged or confirmed), and must describe the

“effectiveness of the technology in assisting in investigations based on data collected.”

Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar) is a senior tech policy reporter at Ars Technica, and a radio producer and author.

“Habeas Data” builds on his coverage by diving deep into the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America. He is based in Oakland. Excerpt is published courtesy of the publisher.

4 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019

Voters Spoke, Now S.F. Must Craft Rules for Data they weren’t consulted on the wording.

The phrase “intent and purpose” is central to the debate, said First Amendment Coalition Executive Director David Snyder.

“That’s a very subjective, squishy phrase,” said Snyder, who served as the Sunshine task force’s attorney from 2010 to 2012. “It’s kind of a circular thing: ‘Consistent with the intent and purpose’ means whatever the Board of Supervisors deems to be ‘consistent with the intent and purpose.’”

Added Drange, “Essentially it would give them the power to check themselves. We’re handing over the authority that currently rests with the public and saying, hey, if you guys want to make changes to the ordinance, go ahead.”

PROP B from Page 1

submitted to the board before June. “It’s time that San Francisco and the nation start actually evolving policies where your location can’t be tracked without your consent,” said District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who authored Proposition B. “This is a teachable moment. San Francisco can lead the nation in privacy-first policies.”

The Charter Amendment, which was put on the ballot by a unanimous vote of the Board of Supervisors, had split advocates and groups that are normally allies — and that otherwise enthusiastically support 99.9 percent of the measure.

The opposition came primarily from journalists and First Amendment watchdogs.

They’re concerned that a small subsection of the measure, only 36 words long, could water down San Francisco’s legendary Sunshine Ordinance, which mandates transparency in city government. They argue — and Peskin and the city attorney dispute — that the language could give the mayor and Board of Supervisors the power to restrict access to public records, meetings and ordinance oversight without voters’ approval.

Notably, there was no vocal objection from Silicon Valley, which appears to be holding its fire for the rulemaking process.

‘FEARS ARE MISPLACED’ Although the First Amendment Coalition was officially opposed, Snyder still believes “the overall stated purposes and the overall purpose of Proposition B is a laudable one.”

“I doubt that that sentence was put in there as a kind of intentional poison pill,” he added. “But the problem with wording like that is that it can ultimately be used that way, regardless of what the original intent was.”

Peskin said worries about an attack on the Sunshine Ordinance are unfounded.

“I think they’ve misread it,” said Peskin of the journalists’ organization. “I respect them, but I think that their fears are misplaced.”

He and the measure’s supporters, including the San Francisco Democratic Party and the San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters, maintain that the language is clearly in support of open government.

Peskin said the phrase “is not inconsistent with the purpose or intent of the voter-approved ordinance” means that no changes could be made to the task force, or the Sunshine Ordinance itself, that didn’t maintain its strength.

“The sentence is very clear,” Peskin told the Public Press. “It cannot in any way diminish the purposes of Sunshine.”

“Any notion that public records laws may be weakened is not only legally impossible, it is a distraction from the important privacy rights that Proposition B would advance,” he wrote in rebuttal to the opponents’ ballot argument.

Before the election, the city attorney supported Peskin’s notion, saying in a written statement that upon passage of Proposition B, “we will advise the City Administrator, Supervisors and Mayor about any proposed privacy ordinances that could impact the Sunshine Ordinance to help ensure they are consistent with the voters’ intent.”

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES So what exactly does Proposition B propose? It contains 11 principles that will apply to city officials, departments, commissions, boards and “other entities”; all contractors and lease holders, and anyone with city-issued licenses, permits or grants.

Many principles exceed the scope of the new state law, including: •Opting • out of handing over personal data but still receiving a company’s services.

•The • right to move about the city and not be tracked without consent.

•Discouraging • the collection of personal information regarding race, religion. sexual orientation, disability and other potentially “sensitive demographics.”

•Anticipating • and mitigating bias in data collection and the use of algorithms.

But exactly what the policies will look like is still unknown. Now that Prop B has been approved, the principles will simply guide the city administrator in writing a new ordinance that must be presented to the Board of Supervisors by May 31. Public hearings will follow before the board votes.

“This proposition is just really a stepping stone,” said Sameena Usman, with the Bay Area Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR. The group endorsed Proposition B, and is most interested in how any resulting privacy legislation would address surveillance.

“When you have local cities that might be gathering this surveillance data and potentially sharing it with the federal government, that’s very concerning,” she added, noting the Trump administration’s interest in tracking Muslims. Her hope is that Proposition B could lead to a separate surveillance ordinance.

BIG DESIRE FOR DIGITAL PRIVACY Data protection remains a major issue in the Bay Area. A May 2018 Silicon Valley Leadership Group survey of 1,843 voters in five counties found that 86 percent were concerned about the security of the personal and financial data they’ve given to companies or placed online. More than two-thirds have had their data compromised, and more than half the respondents supported more government regulation of how companies use that information.

Among all voters, 51 percent backed more regulation, 34 percent preferred about the same degree of regulation and 8 percent wanted less. Liberals were far more likely than conservatives to favor tighter regulations (57 percent versus 38 percent). Both about equally supported no change (38 percent for conservatives, 33 percent for liberals), while conservatives were six times more likely than liberals to want less government intervention (3 percent versus 18 percent). By comparison, a Reuters national poll in March found that 46 percent of adults supported increased regulation, 20 percent said current laws are sufficient and 17 percent wanted less regulation.

“In an ideal world, Congress would have taken this up, but most of the congressional action has not been helpful,” said Shahid Buttar, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It has fallen to states and cities to innovate and to protect innovation and to protect user rights.”

In the past few years, Oakland, Seattle and Chicago have adopted privacy programs. California legislators went further in June, passing the nation’s strongest privacy safeguards, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed. Taking effect in 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act includes a European-style “right to erasure” of one’s personal information, and permits consumers to sue for damages after data breaches.

But many advocates say more is needed.

Photo by Sharon Wickham // Public Press

“It has fallen to states and cities to innovate and to protect innovation and to protect user rights.” ­— Shahid Buttar, Electronic Frontier Foundation ciscans.

“If you deny, you should not be denied the service,” Peskin said. “If you are not willing to accept their standards, you should still be able to use Facebook or to get your scooter ride.”

The privacy policies of Skip and Scoot, which were recently granted permits to operate rentable scooters in San Francisco, differ significantly on this point. While Scoot’s terms of service state that customers’ “user name and profile picture may be publicly available and that search engines may index your name and profile photo,” Skip’s has an option more in line with Proposition B’s principles, allowing customers to “use the Services without providing us with information.”

“Should Proposition B prove successful … it could go a long way towards informing the kind of a regulatory frameworks you could see emerging from other jurisdictions,” said Buttar, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who evaluated the measure while it was being drafted.

The First Amendment Coalition and the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California support Proposition B’s intention to enhance privacy protections, but campaigned to defeat the measure because of concerns about potential harm to the city’s voter-approved Sunshine Ordinance and its task force, an 11-member body charged with protecting the public’s interest in open government. They were joined in their opposition by the League of Women Voters San Francisco and the San Francisco Labor Council, among a dozen

other groups. The San Francisco Green Party, Republican Party and Libertarian Party were also opposed.

Task force chair Bruce Wolfe calls the ordinance “one of the strongest in the country, if not the world,” primarily because of the option of an “immediate disclosure requirement” — a 24-hour deadline for the city to provide requested information, and a focus on accountability of individuals, not just a particular department or agency.

(Public Press Publisher Lila LaHood is a task force member.)

PRO-TRANSPARENCY CULTURE Reporter Matt Drange has first-hand experience with the Sunshine Ordinance’s benefits. He said that while doing a story on gunshot-surveillance technology for the Center for Investigative Reporting he was able to easily get data from the San Francisco Police Department that was not forthcoming from other Bay Area cities.

“There is a definite pro-transparency culture that I think it’s helped to shape,” said Drange, who co-chairs the Freedom of Information Committee of the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. “And that’s what we’re most concerned about losing.”

That fear refers to one particular sentence in subsection (i), on the fifth page of Proposition B. Although the Sunshine Ordinance is not mentioned, it’s the reason those disputed 36 words were included, Peskin said.

All parties agree that the 19-year-old

ordinance needs to be updated, but because it was approved by voters, they would also have to authorize any changes. San Franciscans for Sunshine member Richard Knee wrote that his group hopes to put a package of reforms on the November 2019 ballot. “But it’s a struggle because the group doesn’t have sufficient funds to gather enough voter signatures,” he said. (Knee, a freelance copy editor for the Public Press, co-authored the official ballot argument against Proposition B.) Most pressingly, one of the task force’s members must be nominated by New America Media, which was founded by legendary journalist Sandy Close and closed in November 2017. Until voters approve a change for that process, the seat will remain empty, hampering the body’s work.

Peskin said the language in subsection (i) will allow the Board of Supervisors to replace New America Media with another entity. The supervisors could also make other bureaucratic fixes to the overall ordinance should they arise. It reads: … the Board of Supervisors is authorized by ordinance to amend voter-approved ordinances regarding privacy, open meetings, or public records, provided that any such amendment is not inconsistent with the purpose or intent of the voter-approved ordinance.

“We were trying to do a solid for the sunshine advocates,” said Peskin’s aide Lee Hepner.

But sunshine advocates complained that

“If you are not willing to accept their standards, you should still be able to use Facebook or to get your scooter ride.”

— Aaron

Peskin, District 3 supervisor

THE RIGHT TO RETAIN YOUR DATA “Tech is neither good nor bad; it doesn’t have a built-in morality,” said Peskin.

“Right now, companies know literally everything about you.”

Crucially, he added, whereas the state privacy law allows customers to opt out of their information being sold, the principles in Proposition B allow opting out of that information being collected in the first place.

Even if a consumer didn’t consent to share private financial or personal information, those companies will still be required to make their services available to San Fran-

Photos by Noah Arroyo (left) and Michael Winter // Public Press

By June, the city administrator must decide which San Francisco companies will be subject to new data privacy regulations.

‘THE SHIP HAD SAILED’ But Drange said the journalists’ organization was “caught off guard” in July when it learned how Proposition B might affect the task force.

“It was already on its way to the printer,” Drange said. “The ship had sailed in terms of trying to get it altered or get it removed.” The Society of Professional Journalists already submits names for two of the 11 task force seats, and had been part of previous conversations seeking a fix for the New America Media vacancy.

“It’s bizarre that no one in government let us know,” he said.

Drange said there have been “attacks on the task force” in the past, and he fears a future Board of Supervisors could change its makeup for political reasons, or in other unproductive ways. “They could add a representative for tech companies,” he suggested.

“There was a purge of many members of the task force back in 2012 who had publicly disagreed with a couple of the supervisors at that time, and a couple high-profile cases,” said Drange. “And then following that, the SPJ nominations for task force members in 2014 were actually delayed for months.”

Task force chair Wolfe said they were “not notified at all” and learned about subsection (i) when it was too late to suggest different language. “We had to find out from members of the public and from opengovernment advocates,” he said.

Peskin’s office also pointed out that the measure’s text was publicly available for 60 days, and noted the irony that groups focused on transparency didn’t take advantage of that window.

TECH WATCHING, WAITING Facebook didn’t take a position on Proposition B. “We look forward to working with policymakers in San Francisco on finding approaches that protect people and support responsible innovation,” the company said in a written statement.

Hepner said Facebook and several other tech companies initially approached Peskin’s office when they heard a privacy policy was in the works. But they “stayed out of opposing it, probably because they would like to know how the trailing legislation forms” next spring.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation spoke with Peskin’s office during the drafting process but took no position on the measure.

While digesting election results, it’s important to remember that the passage of Proposition B didn’t change any laws, just cleared a path toward new policies.

“For the sake of expediency in getting some simple amendments changed,” the measure “could be helpful,” said Wolfe, the chair of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. He was “neutral” on the measure, “because the meat of it is so important.”

But “transparency is extremely important these days,” he added. “These laws are really important and they need to be protected with the utmost of care.”

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 5

Photo by Noah Arroyo // Public Press

During a youth-run election forum, moderators Kierre Garrett and Tyjaya Lynch asked 12 school board candidates how they would involve students in policymaking and improve academic achievement. Candidates, from left: Monica Chinchilla, Faauuga Moliga, John Trasviña, Phil Kim, Michelle Parker, Alison Collins, Alida Fisher, Lex Leifheit, Martin Rawlings-Fein, Gabriela López, Roger Sinasohn and Paul Kangas.

By Noah Arroyo // Public Press

I

t was another election forum, another school night, and most of the candidates running for the three open seats on the San Francisco school board were arrayed on a stage, facing their two questioners.

But this fall night of ask-and-answer was different. These candidates would be grilled by representatives of the constituents who matter the most in education but who are seldom heard from in the scramble toward Election Day: the students themselves.

Moderators Kierre Garrett and Tyjaya Lynch, both 17, controlled the program that night, firing questions at 12 of the 18 candidates and calling on selected students to ask what was on their minds.

And Lynch did not hesitate to be the enforcer. When candidates, several of them educators, didn’t follow instructions to keep answers brief, she checked them: “Yes or no, please.” When they talked past the time chime, she was the sheriff.

The late-September forum, at the African American Art & Culture Complex in the Fillmore District, was unique in this election season. It was designed and run by members of Youth Council, ages 16 to 24, part of the My Brother and Sister’s Keeper initiative by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. Questions revolved around how the district could foster equity among schools, how to close the achievement gap — or “opportunity gap,” as some called it — between white and minority students, and how to involve students in key policy decisions.

About 80 parents and students turned out for the forum, which was co-sponsored

by Black Young Democrats, Black Community Matters and the Public Press.

RACISM AND SEGREGATION An audience member asked the candidates how they felt about the “school-toprison pipeline and its effects on students of color.” Alison Collins, a former educator of 20 years who writes an education blog, answered last. She didn’t mince words. The other candidates had offered ideas for dismantling the pipeline, like increasing literacy or reducing policing on campus. But none had put a name to the reason such policies were necessary in the first place.

“Systemic racism is a problem,” said Collins, the only African-American on the stage. “If we’re not going to talk about racism — and actually say ‘racism,’ which nobody wants to say — we’re not going to fix problems that are related to racism.

“There are also kids that behave in totally normal ways, and are criminalized for it. Our children are labeled violent, angry, problematic, too loud, I mean, you see it all over the country, right? And it’s happening in our schools,” Collins said. “I’m a mixedrace person, my kids are treated differently, based on the color of their skin. And that’s something that really needs to be talked about.”

With that, the forum had placed its finger on these well-documented facts: The district’s African-American students have long lagged their white and Asian counterparts in scholastic achievement, while exceeding them in suspensions.

Garrett, who attends City Arts and Tech High School, and Lynch, a student at Raoul Wallenberg High School, underscored fundamental inequalities in the city’s educational system during a series of quick yes-no questions to the candidates.

“Do you believe the curriculum is inclusive of all people’s histories, specifically people of color?”

“No,” the candidates replied, one by one.

“History is written by the rich,” candidate Paul Kangas, a Navy veteran, private investigator and father of three, interjected.

“Do you think the current studentassignment system has made the schools more segregated?”

“Yes,” they all said.

Segregation is nothing new for the dis-

YOUTHS TAKE CHARGE

Students grill school board candidates on inequality, systemic racism

weigh in on district expenditures. “Students should be looking at those budgets and telling us which items are actually making an impact,” he said.

Taking a slightly different tack, John Trasviña, who served as the Department of Housing and Urban Development assistant secretary for fair housing under President Barack Obama, said the district should support student newspapers because they “can expose a lot of things that are going on within the district, and be a voice for students.”

IMPORTANCE OF BEING HEARD

Photos by Michael Winter // Public Press

At the African American Art & Culture Complex in the Fillmore District, the audience listened closely as candidates answered questions. At right, Alison Collins, who was one of three to be elected, spoke as Michelle Parker and Phil Kim waited their turns. trict. The Public Press found in 2015 that the problem was getting worse, but in December 2017, the district reported that the number of schools with more than 60 percent of a single racial or ethnic group had fallen from 22 to 17 schools since 2011. The issue resurfaced in September when school board commissioners called for changing the current assignment system.

Asked how he would close the achievement gap, social worker Faauuga Moliga suggested that schools should open more “wellness facilities,” where therapists, social workers and pediatricians would help students grapple with problems that influence and go beyond scholastic achievement.

“Some of these kids and families are coming from really tough places,” Moliga said.

Michelle Parker, former president of the district Parent Teacher Association, said the district should “make sure that all of the children in San Francisco have access to two years of high-quality preschool before they come to kindergarten. We know that that works.”

She also noted that other districts were using an “equity index” to determine how to divvy up money among schools. In their calculations, the districts weigh rates of gun violence and asthma in the surrounding neighborhoods. San Francisco could follow that example, she said.

fascinating to see friendships spring up between schools, who are sharing resources, sharing professional development opportunities, in addition to sharing PTA funds.”

Political organizer Monica Chinchilla suggested soliciting contributions from residents who live near schools and “don’t have kids but still want to help. They believe in education and have dollars to spend.”

Throughout the night, there was broad agreement about other problems that hamper student equity. They said that teachers should be paid more and receive more staff support in classrooms, and that the district should hire more black and brown faculty.

POLICYMAKERS INVOLVING STUDENTS One audience member, a senior at Mission High School, said that policies on discipline, safety and curriculum are often made without consulting the students.

“What system will you put in place to ensure you are collecting input from students?” he asked.

“Students should be sitting on every district committee we have,” said education consultant Alida Fisher, a mother of four African-American students. “We have par-

ents sit on a lot of them, but students? No.” Lex Leifheit, who works for the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said that in such a scenario, “I think we need to think about stipends and about paying them for their time.” Other candidates concurred.

Parker suggested that students lead district discussions, emulating some parentteacher conferences. “I think that makes it much more relevant to you,” she said.

Many other ideas surfaced. “I would love to see students have a seat on the board,” said Martin Rawlings-Fein, a bi/ trans parent employed by the University of California, San Francisco. Gabriela López, a teacher at Leonard Flynn Elementary School, suggested that every school have a student representative, similar to how they all have union representatives. Roger Sinasohn, a writer and technology worker married to a city teacher, said that board members could visit schools more often, and that the homeroom period would be an appropriate forum for meeting with students to discuss policy. Collins said the district could also use online polls to get student feedback.

Kim said students should be able to

FUNDING INEQUALITY AMONG PTAS One audience member said “it seems wrong” that some parent-teacher associations raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for their schools while others do not, and he asked how the candidates would address this. (The Public Press reported in 2014 that fundraising provides some schools with supplies and extracurricular programs that others cannot afford.)

Most candidates liked the idea of pooling PTA-raised money from schools and redistributing it based on need — as long as parents were involved in that decision.

Parker said the district could “get creative” about raising money, and she referred to her previous efforts courting corporations to donate to the district.

Phil Kim, manager of Science & Design, Computer Science and Engineering for KIPP charter schools, said he liked the model employed by Circle the Schools, an initiative by San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation, headed by tech heavyweight Ron Conway, in which “nonprofits and companies actually sponsor schools.” Kim added that it “would be really

Photo by Yesica Prado // Public Press

Students and advisers with the Youth Council, which organized and ran the forum and came up with questions to ask candidates for the Board of Education. Yolanda Flakes is center in black sweatshirt.

What sparked students to organize and run the forum?

The Youth Council had been playing with the idea of an election event when De’Anthony Jones, a liaison at the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services who works with the council, attended a mayoral forum in May sponsored by San Francisco Young Black Democrats, Black Community Matters and the Public Press. That inspired the Youth Council — also the San Francisco Community Action Team for Opportunity Youth United, a national civic-engagement organization — to do something similar to inject student voices into a process that parents and other adults generally control.

“They said, ‘Hey, let’s focus on the school board.’ It’s something they’re directly affected by,” Jones said.

Yolanda Flakes joined the council in part to figure out how to elevate underrepresented voices. She was one of about 15 youths who crafted the event’s questions.

At 17, Flakes’ complex identity gives her a unique perspective into the cultural friction playing out in classrooms. She is African-American and Filipina, raised by her black birth mother, but for the last eight years, she has lived with her white foster parents. She spent her first two years of high school at a private school she characterized as better resourced than Mission High, where she is a senior. These experiences have shaped the way she speaks and carries herself.

“When people first meet me, they assume something about me, because I’m a black person, but they note something that isn’t stereotypical about me,” Flakes said.

“They’ll look at other black people differently.”

She said teachers often discipline other African-American students more harshly than her and her white peers. From her vantage, “looking at it from the outside,” she said that teachers should try harder to listen and make space for students to share how they feel about their experiences and the punishments they receive in class.

“If they were given the chance to explain themselves, the teachers would be able to fix the problems,” Flakes said. “The more and more we’re not able to say what we want to say, the more fueled we are to want to say it. And it just keeps adding up, and adding up, until a bad situation happens.

And we get blamed for being bad kids.”

Jones suggested that teachers employ restorative-justice practices instead of suspending students.

“As opposed to kicking them out, limiting their access to education, we should be giving them an opportunity to actually learn what they did,” Jones said, “giving them solutions on how to self-manage, handle stress. A lot of these teachers don’t realize the kind of trauma students go through at home.”

Jones suggested that the district take this approach on a larger scale by holding town-hall-style events, where school board members could hear directly from students about the problems affecting them.

“I can’t say it can be solved entirely, but it is their job to come up with the solution,” Jones said of the board.

Update: Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga were elected Nov. 6.

DO PARKS PUSH PEOPLE OUT?

6 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019

By Pendarvis Harshaw // Bay Nature

W

ay back, decades before the current investigations and faked tests and lawsuits over the cleanup of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, people in southeastern San Francisco neighborhoods knew their ground and air were dirty. They worked on the Navy ships among the exposed asbestos, they breathed the emissions from the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power plant, they heard the rumors about the nuclear waste poured down the sink at the radiation research lab just down the hill from public housing. Once, a brushfire smoldered for more than a month underground, releasing wild blue and green smoke into the sky. They knew about the toxic dust kicked up every time a construction project rolled through, the smell of the rendering plant, and the kids who snuck through the fences to sit by the power plant outflow pond on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They also knew help wouldn’t come from outside. “Government agencies have a poor track record of keeping residents safe and healthy during the cleanups,” one BayviewHunters Point community newsletter concluded. “Taking care of residents while the cleanup and construction work happens is the main concern.”

So the people who lived here became informed and active. They gathered their own data. They led so-called toxic tours to show people the sites that jeopardized community health. They prepared reports showing what environmental injustice looks like: A 10 percent asthma rate in 2004 among Bayview-Hunters Point residents that was almost twice the national average. One in 6 kids with asthma. A rate of birth defects, 44.3 per 1,000 births, much higher than the 33.1 per 1,000 countywide. Infant mortality rates 2.5 times higher than the rest of San Francisco’s.

They led town hall discussions, started newsletters covering everything from housing developments to what fish was safe to eat, and held a “People’s Earth Day.” And by the 1990s, they started to win. A proposal for a second power plant was shut down. The Port of San Francisco abandoned a proposal for a new shipping terminal. The Environmental Protection Agency and Navy started the Superfund cleanup process at the former naval shipyard. The EPA’s Brownfields Program authorized numerous localized cleanups. And in 2006, PG&E closed its Hunters Point power plant and the long road to site cleanup began.

This summer, I joined nine high-school and transitional-age kids from the neighborhood to tour their southeast San Francisco backyard, to walk toxic ground that connects the local fight for environmental justice with their futures. The young folks, interns with the group Literacy for Environmental Justice, are spending the summer gathering air quality data in their neighborhood, because as LEJ community programs manager Anthony Khalil tells them he’s learned in nearly two decades of work in this corner of the city, “it doesn’t mean anything until we can come together, get organized and share this data.”

Khalil co-captains the tour and drives the van. Riding shotgun is Raymond Tompkins, who is commonly referred to as “Dr. Raymond,” an elder environmental activist and former chemistry teacher who claims to be retired, but hasn’t stopped teaching yet.

I

ride in the back with the interns. Present, but unmentioned, is a shared understanding that as the battle for clean air, soil and water carries on in the Bayview, another threat looms. We all know the numbers, and we all know we are touring a lot of toxic places whose cleanup — if it happens — and redevelopment will change this neighborhood’s character and displace many existing residents, including perhaps these kids.

The tour starts as we pull out of LEJ’s headquarters at the Candlestick Point Community Garden, where Tompkins sounds the first note about the future. “You have Candlestick,” he says. “In the next 20 years, that property is going to be worth $100 billion.”

“100 billion?!” I say, overly pronouncing the b.

“Yes, sir. Not million, billion,” Tompkins confirms.

Heading north, continuing through the neighborhoods that follow the shoreline in Bayview-Hunters Point, we wind around Yosemite Slough, where California State Parks and the EPA have worked for a decade to clean up toxic soil from nearly a century’s worth of sewage, dumping and industry. Behind chain-link construction fences, a trail now leads out past a few muddy artificial islands for nesting birds.

The narrow inlet widens into a curving stretch of the bay, separating the public housing projects in the Double Rock neighborhood from the south edge of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

The 500-acre shipyard is a Superfund site with a two-decades-long, scandal-ridden history of cleanup of radioactive material, most recently slowed down by the discovery last summer that a portion of the site’s clean soil sample results was falsified.

Tompkins shows us the place where the blue-green fire burned and the former lab where workers poured nuclear waste down the sink. As we exit the shipyard, we see a giant magenta billboard with the logo for developer FivePoint in one corner and “Come Back Soon” in big letters.

A few minutes later, Khalil pulls the van onto a freshly paved surface that overlooks India Basin, the inlet north of the shipyard, and parks. The kids jump out of the van and stand firm in their Nikes on the cement yard adjacent to where the PG&E power plant’s cooling pond once stood. At the moment, the pavement is used as a community event space by the group Now Hunters Point. But that’s a temporary setup.

“What’s next?” Khalil asks the group.

A bike rider casually coasts past in the distance toward the restored wetland park at Heron’s Head. “How do you develop this

Parks improve health and fight climate change. But not all parks affect a community in the same way — and the question is: ‘Who’s it for?’

Pendarvis Harshaw wrote this story while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism 2018 California Fellowship

Illustration by Emeric L. Kennard

in a way that’s not only environmentally sustainable, but is just for existing communities?”

I don’t think the question is rhetorical, but it doesn’t garner an answer from the teenagers. Khalil continues, “I personally have this feeling, and I bet you all would agree with me, that we have a long way to go.”

“When we look at this site,” Tompkins says, “we not only look at the victory as well as the challenge of shutting down the power plant, but we also look at how the neighborhood develops and builds up.”

Listening to Tompkins, I think about the people who have lived here over the past seven decades and have made this place.

Bayview-Hunters Point, the southeastern chunk of San Francisco east of Highway 101 (or more officially ZIP code 94124), is the city’s last major African-American neighborhood. Many of them moved here from the South to build ships during World War II and until the last few decades made up more than 65 percent of the neighborhood’s population. They were once relegated to this neighborhood by redlining and housing covenants, and they made the most of what they were given. They were and are blue-collar workers, who labor in factories and plants. They were and are artists who serve as culture keepers, amplifying the story of a people on the backside of the most scenic city in the world. Despite being disregarded by local and federal governing bodies — not to mention overly policed — the effort put forth by the people who care about this community laid the foundation for what’s next in southeast San Francisco.

The official “next” includes more than 13,000 new homes split between two major

developments. At least 75 percent of those homes will sell as market-rate luxury units, which will more than double the number of housing units in Bayview-Hunters Point. So once it’s cleaned up, who will live here in two decades? Who will shop in the planned 700,000 square feet of commercial and retail space and work in the 3 million square feet of research and development space between Candlestick Point and the Bayview? Who, a lot of residents ask when they look at those numbers, is this cleanup really for?

I got a hint after I plugged the shipyard’s developer, FivePoint, into an Internet search query and started to get targeted email and social media advertisements for tours of their new luxury homes. The marketing images show modern glass-andearth-tone housing, with just a couple of horizontal wooden slats on the exterior — because what says “new development” more than those damned wooden slats?

What this cleanup and overhaul is for, according to the city, is a once-in-a-generation development integrated fully into an urban ecological utopia. The city, developers and park advocates envision a 13-mile “Blue Greenway” from where the San Francisco Giants currently play baseball, at AT&T Park on China Basin, south to where they used to play, at Candlestick Park. “Think ‘Crissy Field meets the High Line,’” the San Francisco Parks Alliance page introducing the Blue Greenway plan reads, as an introduction to its park-and-nature-centric ambition for these neighborhoods. “Could an Overlooked Cove in San Francisco’s Bayview Become the Next Golden Gate Park?” a KQED headline asked in August.

Developer renderings for Candlestick, the

Shipyard and India Basin show parks connecting all the new housing developments to each other and to the bay. The Blue Greenway map shows native plants and birds where once there were industrial plants and warehouses. Wetland-fringed shoreline parks feature prominently along the entire Blue Greenway, connecting residents to the regional goal of a restored San Francisco Bay. At 900 Innes Ave., a former industrial site now owned by the city’s Recreation and Parks Department, federal government brownfield grants will help clean up and fill the largest remaining gap in the San Francisco Bay Trail — connecting India Basin developer BUILD LLC’s proposed “Cove Terrace,” a “prominent public-private plaza, lined with active ground-floor restaurants and cafes,” to the India Basin Shoreline Park and a new public pier and kayak launch site.

The end of my toxics tour takes place just up the street from where that new pier will be. We stand in a group looking out at Heron’s Head Park, where the Bay Trail picks up again and leads out to the water.

A few terns fly over the blue-green water of the former power plant cooling pond. The sound of the offshore breeze is overwhelmed by the noise of construction trucks laboring in the distance, building a future for this neighborhood that looks nothing like what it is now.

“Who is it for?” Tompkins asks.

M

arie Harrison, who has “lived, worked and played” in the Bayview since she first moved there as a teenager in the late 1960s, says that whoever the greening of the neighborhood is for, it’s not for her or her children and grandchil-

One proposal for redeveloping 700 Innes Ave. in San Francisco’s India Basin includes a “mixed-use village with retail shops, apartments, and townhomes intricately linked to a 6-acre park along the shoreline.”

dren. “They call it ‘green’ to give it a more natural kind of a feel,” she told me by phone from Stockton, where she moved two years ago. “To me, it’s more or less the idea of moving folks out and replacing them with new folks. With us in particular, it’s all about gentrification. I don’t care what you call it. You can dress it up and give it a new name if you like. But it still boils down to gentrification.”

Academics have coined the term “green gentrification” to describe the phenomenon in which environmental cleanup, restoration and neighborhood greening prepare the ground for displacement of existing communities. It sums up what some residents say is beginning to happen in southeastern San Francisco, and how more universally the arrival of parks or cleanup of legacy pollution isn’t always fully welcome. For some, new parks can feel no different than tech shuttle stops or gastropubs: a signal that they are about to see a lot of richer, whiter neighbors. Green gentrification has already happened, or is a source of tension, in urban enclaves around the United States.

Along the Los Angeles River, for example, community organizations have formed to fight riverside gentrification as the city maps out restoration of the 51-mile river path. In Washington, D.C., longtime residents of the Anacostia River have filed a class action lawsuit against the city, claiming its plans to “alter land use” and lure millennials to the area through luxury waterfront housing and parks constitutes discrimination against the current, older black community. In the recent Resilient by Design competition around the San Francisco Bay, designers proposed community housing trusts to protect residents from displacement as the region deals with sea level rise. In perhaps the most famous case, the High Line in New York City transformed an abandoned railway to a green pathway park, changing the neighborhood character entirely. “The High Line,” a New York Times op-ed by Jeremiah Moss, author of Vanishing New York, declared, “has become a tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history.”

Even the High Line’s developers now say their project is something of a cautionary tale; in 2017, High Line Executive Director Robert Hammond started a website called The High Line Network to advise how similar projects might restore land without disrupting surrounding neighborhoods. In a 2017 interview with Fast Company, Hammond said, “When we opened, we realized the local community wasn’t coming to the

Drawings from San Francisco Planning Department

GREEN ENOUGH continued on Page 7

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 7

S.F.’s Southeast Might Be Site of ‘Green Gentrification’

T

he complexity of remaking the Bayview-Hunters Point shoreline can’t be overstated, with multiple Superfund and Brownfields cleanup projects underway and three commercial developers, at least half a dozen city agencies, numerous advocacy organizations and the public all involved. The Blue Greenway has been intertwined with the redevelopment since the city, under then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, launched a Blue Greenway task force in 2005 and tried to include a wide swath of input from interested parties: more than 16 public agencies, more than 40 neighborhood associations, nonprofit entities — including environmental advocates SPUR, the Bay Trail and the Trust for Public Land — businesses and concerned residents. Among the many goals laid out in the Blue Greenway task force document “Vision and Road Map to Implementation” is “build community support.” It’s stressed repeatedly.

The San Francisco Parks Alliance (the driving force behind the Blue Greenway), the developers Lennar and BUILD, and the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department have held hundreds of community meetings over the last decade. They say they’ve shaped their plans accordingly.

“I don’t think our organization thinks that investing in a neighborhood in a positive way creates displacement,” S.F. Parks Alliance Chief Executive Officer Drew Becher told me. “It’s like people saying you shouldn’t have nice things.”

The Parks Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for the city’s parks, has helped secure more than $38 million for the Blue Greenway. Becher says the Alliance has invested in numerous community gardens and residential parks in San Francisco and seen, in fact, increased sense of community and no displacement. That’s what he expects now from the redevelopment of southeastern San Francisco, he told me.

“The Blue Greenway was made to benefit every neighborhood it touches and the entire city,” Becher said. “I strongly believe that every community wants to have great open space, and that’s what we’re advocating for.”

Ultimately, Santa Cruz sociologist Dillon says, whoever will feel represented by the Blue Greenway comes down to who thinks their concerns were addressed. At this point, Dillon says about who feels heard, “Longtime black or southeast Asian Bayview residents, probably not — no one that I know feels that way.” One of Dillon’s dissertation chapters, which she’s now turning into a book chapter, focuses on attitudes toward Heron’s Head, the restored wetland park built on top of the cleaned-up rubble of a shipping terminal. Conservation groups that have helped steward the park through its restoration see it as an environmental justice victory, a place where birds and na-

A

cross the bay from San Francisco, in the flatlands of Richmond, a woman named Toody Maher stands in Elm Playlot wearing a shirt that reads “Pogo Park” on the lapel. “We’re a nonprofit in Richmond,” says Maher, the organization’s executive director. “We worked with community residents to reclaim this park.”

Maher is in the green picnic area as she describes what the park used to be like.

“First of all, all of the houses around the park were boarded up and abandoned,” she says. “And people were squatting and living in them, and men were coming to the park all day to just drink. The park was nothing but broken glass. People used to bring their dogs to fight or train.”

She says the city installed a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of new play equipment in the early 2000s, “and within weeks, people tried to burn it down.”

Then Maher’s Pogo Park came and announced its interest in adopting the park from the city. They signed an agreement, allowing Pogo Park to work with the city closely, but, as Maher says, “We were allowed to reimagine the park with the community.” This let Pogo Park employees and local residents design the park’s barbecue grills, trash cans and even a custom fence with cutout profiles of the people who worked on it. They designed it all at a local fabrication laboratory — the same one that made the humongous glove in the outfield of the Giants ballpark in San Francisco, overlooking the northern limit of the pro-

Southeast SF/Blue Greenway

Census tract boundaries

A Photos courtesy of Pogo Park

Richmond residents helped design and build the amenities at Elm Playlot — including a fence with profiles of those who helped build the park — as well as create the programming for kids and adults. Programs included a small-animal petting zoo and free eye exams. posed Blue Greenway.

Inside the Pogo Park office in Richmond, which was once an abandoned house adjacent to the park, there are photos of community members welding the equipment for the park. “We bought the house next to the park, and got a $300 fridge from craigslist, and started serving lunches out of it,” Maher says. “We’ve served like 12,000 meals.”

Pop-up events helped bring the park to life, slowly building momentum in the community. In 2006, California voters approved Proposition 84, a $5.4 billion bond that included $490 million for park improvements, and Pogo Park won a $2 million grant from the state to build the park the way Maher

says all parks should be built — involving the community in every step from start to finish.

Pogo Park’s head of research, Joe Griffin, explained how the towering plane trees in the park stand as a metaphor for Pogo Park’s approach to working with the community. The trees signal who the park is for. “It wasn’t just replacing the beauty that’s already in the neighborhood, but adding to it and uncovering it, so it could actually grow,” he says. “Which is the same thing we’re trying to do with the community itself: We’re not trying to replace people, we’re trying to work with the strengths that we have.”

Richmond/Elm Playlot

W

Study area

Census tract boundaries

70

70

60

60

50

50

40

40

30

30

20

20

10

10

0

Black

Percentage of Population

Asian/Pacific Islander

Southeast SF

2000

Hispanic

0

White

>

park, and the three main reasons were, they felt it wasn’t built for them, they didn’t see people like them there, and they didn’t like the programming.”

It’s not that parks necessarily cause gentrification. But the way they’re designed and built hints at the future of the neighborhood, as evidenced by the ambivalent attitude toward the Blue Greenway I heard from the longtime Bayview-Hunters Point activists, residents, and community organization members and leaders. Look at those redevelopment drawings closely and ask who they’re for, and one’s whole perspective might shift. When Tompkins was highlighting the capital-B-billion-dollar value of that shipyard development, he was calling our attention to the big-picture forces shaping the future here and what it likely means for people who live here now, especially the renters who make up 48 percent of the Bayview-Hunters Point ZIP code.

“Parks are not discrete spaces,” says UC Santa Cruz sociologist Lindsey Dillon, who has spent more than a decade researching environmental justice in Hunters Point.

“If you build parks but are not protecting people from market forces, which in San Francisco are so rampant, then parks are going to become unwitting participants in displacement. It’s not about intentionality, or about parks per se. It’s about urban planning more broadly.”

In other words: Of course people want parks in their neighborhoods. But they told me repeatedly that they want the parks to be built for them. At the most basic level, that means proceeding with extreme thoughtfulness. It means, Bayview activists say, beginning with a toxic cleanup that hews to the same standards as those in Crissy Field, San Francisco’s 78 percent white Marina District. To people like Marie Harrison, it means incorporating job training for neighborhood residents in park development, designing parks with widespread local consensus and building them with local workers. And it means not conceiving of them as amenities to increase the sales point on soon-to-be-built luxury housing, as some Bayview residents told me they see the Blue Greenway’s parks.

“It would be positive if they cleaned up the parks and made them really nice and left open space, because it used to be a community of children,” Harrison says.

“Unfortunately, the plan is to tear down and make walkways. To tear down all of the old buildings, to partially clean — or clean what they only have to. Put grass over it.

And make a few docks and restaurants where people with boats from as far away as Oakland, Richmond and San Jose can sail up and pull over at Innes Avenue and have lunch or dinner. Nice restaurants and music areas, stroll through the wetlands and that kind of thing. And I’m thinking, ‘Wow. How many folks do you know that live in public housing, personally? And how many of them do you know own boats?’”

tive plants have conquered formerly toxic waste and where it’s surprising that more local residents don’t visit. Conservationists, Dillon writes, tend to see the nature in the park as redemptive, purifying, separate from the industrial or human processes in the surrounding neighborhoods. Many local residents Dillon interviews, though, don’t separate the park’s long, complicated history — which they’ve lived through and been a part of — from its present so easily.

“To my mind,” she writes, “these diverging opinions of the wetlands also reveal the complex relationship between the nature projects and the market-driven redevelopment process in Bayview-Hunters Point, which many residents experience as a form of displacement, and connect with a longer history of racism in San Francisco.”

Longtime Bayview-Hunters Point resident Harrison explained divisions within the community this way: “When you sit a room full of poor folks on one side and homeowners on the other side, who are trying to bring all of this quote ‘greening’ into our areas, and trying to pass if off as something that’s going to be good and healthy for you, and you can’t see through that? And I’m saying, ‘Good Lord! We’re black, we’re not stupid.’”

You can ask the same questions of all redevelopment projects, green and otherwise.

Who’s making the decisions, and who’s getting what they want, and who is being represented, and whose urban planning aesthetic is the priority?

Staff for San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Malia Cohen, who has represented Bayview-Hunters Point for the last eight years and is described on the Blue Greenway website as a “dedicated champion of the Blue Greenway,” did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the project.

San Francisco isn’t alone in facing these questions. The Bay Area’s housing crisis and high number of renters make residents here particularly susceptible to displacement of any kind. From restoration and park enhancement on the Guadalupe River in San Jose to street tree planting in East Palo Alto, to shoreline restoration and creek daylighting projects throughout Alameda and Contra Costa counties, the same question hangs over the work: Who is this for?

>

GREEN ENOUGH from Page 6

more to do with skyrocketing tech salaries and a lack of renter protections. “Parks are not amenities,” he says. “They help lower emissions that contribute to climate change. They help the social fabric of communities, and they provide recreational and quality-of-life benefits that are extremely important.”

But he does note that community involvement in the development of urban parks is essential: “If you don’t have community involvement in the park, it’s a failure. The park has to be a reflection of the community. They have to help with the design of the park. If you get that, and you really take seriously community participation, then they take ownership over it. They care about helping to maintain it.”

Tonie Lee, who works with Maher at Pogo Park, is one of those community members photographed using welding tools to build pieces for the park. Lee said she used to play in the park as a kid; she’s happy with how the park has changed and how the formerly boarded-up houses in the surrounding community are now housing families instead of vagrant drug users. But she has noticed that even positive change comes with a cost.

“This house right here was up for sale,” says Lee, pointing to a building just across the street. “On their website and on their flyers, they included the park as promotion to sell their place.” She was dismayed.

“That was one of our big things, like, ‘Really, they’re using it as advertisement?’

They never did come and even give a dollar as a donation or anything, but you’re using it to promote the sale of your place?”

It’s hard in some ways to compare central Richmond and southeastern San Francisco.

There are enormous market forces and decades of individual history acting on each.

But these tensions around housing, parks and the future are shared. It was striking to me that one community has mostly embraced its park, while another community continues to organize to prevent the future “green” vision from arriving. (Various Bayview-Hunters Point community groups plan to create a “Save Bayview Hunters Point Coalition” specifically to fight gentrification in the future Blue Greenway.) It was striking to me that in Richmond, Pogo Park set up in a house next to the park and asked community members to weld playground equipment, while in San Francisco, Marie Harrison told me, one park hired an outsider to paint African-motif art on the walls. Maybe you can’t directly compare the neighborhoods or their parks. But the more you compare the process, the way they’ve gone about building a greener future, the more it’s clear who they’re building for.

Black

Percentage of Population

2016

2000

2016

19,572.00

20,613.00

Bachelor's Degree

10.7%

26.4%

Bachelor's Degree

Poverty

27.4%

24.4%

Renters

57.7%

56.2%

Total Population

Average of Median Household Incomes

$58,509

$58,441

Asian/Pacific Islander

Census Tract 3760 Total Population

2000

Study area

Hispanic

White

2016

2000

2016

5,959.00

5,547.00

5.2%

11.5%

Poverty

23.8%

27.4%

Renters

64.3%

69.7%

$37,786

$34,958

Median Household Income

Census estimates subject to sampling error. Income figures adjusted for inflation into 2016 dollars. Bachelor’s degrees are among adults 25 and older. Median household income for San Francisco is an average of medians from several census tracts. Sources: 2000 Census, 2012-2016 American Community Survey; Infographic by Amber Manfree. Data analysis: Phillip Reese

hat’s happened in Richmond’s Elm Playlot also has a name in academic circles. In a 2012 paper about environmental gentrification in Brooklyn, N.Y., Winifred Curran and SUNY Buffalo geographer Trina Hamilton looked at what they describe as a different model of urban redevelopment. In the Greenpoint community, longtime residents were actively involved in reshaping their neighborhood. “Neighborhood residents and business owners seem to be advocating a strategy we call ‘just green enough,’” Curran and Hamilton wrote, “in order to achieve environmental remediation without environmental gentrification.” The phrase has become a rallying cry for many community advocates.

“The ‘just green enough’ strategy depends on the willingness of planners and local stakeholders to design green space projects that are explicitly shaped by community concerns, needs, and desires rather than either conventional urban design formulae or ecological restoration approaches,” UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design Dean Jennifer Wolch and colleagues Jason Byrne and Joshua Newell wrote in a journal article in 2014. In a conversation at her office in Berkeley, Calif., Wolch told me that it’s not just about drawing up blueprints for housing and showing up from another part of the city to plant native plants. “Part of the process has been heavy community outreach,” she said.

As environmental justice has become more explicitly part of legislation, the calculus in other developments has started to change. I talked to Rico Mastrodonato, a senior government relations manager at the Trust for Public Land, who helped write equity policies into the state’s newly approved park funding bond, Proposition 68.

Mastrodonato is not convinced that creating parks in urban areas causes displacement.

A resident of the Mission District for the first 20 years of the tech boom, he thinks San Francisco’s gentrification issue has

few days after visiting Pogo Park, I met with Joe Griffin at a cafe in Berkeley. In addition to his Pogo Park role, Griffin is a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development. He says he hasn’t seen Pogo Park mentioned in any real estate ads, but he’s interested in seeing more resources come to the community — so as long as it’s done properly: “We want people to come and invest, but not at the cost of displacement of all the families. ... You see so many other neighborhoods where they’re not being able to enjoy the fruits of their labor.”

Much like Bayview-Hunters Point across the bay, the community around Richmond’s Pogo Park has seen its share of environmental injustices. It’s in Richmond’s Iron Triangle — where there’s a crossing of three train tracks. Toxic clouds from the Chevron Richmond Refinery can float by with a simple gust of wind. The city and residents sued the refinery for emissions released during a fire in August 2012; the case was settled earlier this year, with Chevron agreeing to pay $5 million.

“All of those environmental pollutants are in the area, but to an extent, it’s become normalized,” Griffin says. “I grew up in Richmond; everyone had asthma. I went to college, everyone doesn’t have asthma.

What’s going on?”

Griffin says the focus of his studies at UC Berkeley is the health impact of the public redevelopment of Pogo Park, particularly toxic stress (suffered for elongated periods, often during formative years) within members of the community. He plans on using mixed methods, data and experiences, to tell the full story. He’s just getting started collecting statistical data and where he’ll present his findings is still to be determined. But it will definitely include a presentation at the park, open to all community members who are available to come.

Before we parted ways, I had to ask Griffin the question at the center of my study: How do you revitalize a neighborhood and keep people there?

“That’s a huge question. ... I think that plays into a lot of the fear when you see something in a neighborhood revitalizing,” says Griffin. “In the neighborhood I’m from, when we started seeing bike lanes, we were like, ‘Wait a minute, why are there bike lanes there? Why did they fix those light poles and what is that bench doing here?’

You get scared.”

He says that even though working to improve the community could price out longtime residents, it didn’t stop the Pogo Park team from making the community better. It was their project.

And then he noted the most important piece to the puzzle about including a community in redevelopment plans: “It can have an effect on the social environment — how people are connected to each other.”

Griffin turned into a bit of cafe orator as he continued. “And it can affect the economic environment — that’s the importance of having staff members who are also local residents — and being able to pay them, so it’s not just a nights and weekends thing.

This is a part of what they do and how they feel financially secure in the neighborhood.

It affects place in a lot of different ways.”

Bay Nature is a quarterly magazine that explores and celebrates the beauty of the natural world in the San Francisco Bay Area.

8 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019

Boosters cite charter results, but critics say they drain funds and cherry-pick students

By Rob Waters // Public Press

W

hen students at Malcolm X Academy returned to their elementary school in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco in August to begin a new year, they came back to a changed environment. Over the summer, part of their school building had been taken over by KIPP Bayview Elementary, a charter school operated by the Knowledge Is Power Program, the largest charter network in the country and in San Francisco.

For Malcolm X students and staff, the KIPP school was hardly welcome. The San Francisco Board of Education had voted unanimously in 2017 to reject KIPP’s application to open a new school, its third in the neighborhood and fourth in the city. Teachers and students at Malcolm X were also opposed and marched around the neighborhood in May in protest.

But local preferences didn’t matter. The State Board of Education overruled the city’s school board and approved KIPP’s application. The conflict between the two schools — and activists on both sides of the issue — reflects a growing battle playing out in San Francisco and across the state.

Critics say charter and traditional public schools aren’t operating on equal footing — that charters take less than their fair share of the most challenging students, including homeless children and those with learning disabilities, and that they suspend and expel students at higher rates. That selectivity may boost charter test scores, but it erodes hard-won progress in public classrooms and siphons resources from public schools, these critics contend. They argue that the increasingly aggressive, privately funded push for charters amounts to a massive effort to privatize public education by turning public dollars over to private, self-governing entities.

ENROLLMENT DECLINING This conflict may have a profound effect on the future of the city’s public schools.

Enrollment has been declining for years, as poor and middle-class parents flee the city’s high housing costs and affluent families send their kids to private schools. The number of African-American students in district schools dropped from 10,136 in 1996-1997 to 3,925 in 2016-2017. The district has grappled for years with large gaps in test scores and graduation rates that leave African-American and Latino students far behind whites and Asians.

Those gaps have created a hunger for change by black and brown families, and an opportunity for charters. “All parents, including and especially parents in lowincome communities, deserve to have public school choice and to have many options,” said Beth Sutkus Thompson, chief executive officer of KIPP Bay Area Public Schools.

The backers of charter schools are led by the San Jose nonprofit advocacy group Innovate Public Schools, which is bankrolled

by Silicon Valley technology investors and the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropy started by the founders of Walmart.

In the past year, Innovate has stepped up its activities in San Francisco, hosting public forums, hiring community organizers and publishing a stream of reports and social media posts that promote charter schools and highlight the poor performance of the city’s public schools in serving African-American and Latino students. It also acts as an incubator, underwriting the costs of developing new charters.

CHARTERS VS. DISTRICT

THE BATTLE FOR SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC SCHOOLS marginalized families don’t have the wherewithal,” said Mark Sanchez, a former San Francisco principal now serving his second stint on the city’s Board of Education. “They will default into the district school closest to home, and we will gladly serve them.”

This may lower the school’s performance on test scores and “allow charter schools to say, ‘We’re doing a better job than you.’ But they’re not reaching the hardest-to-serve students.”

Asked about this during an interview, Hammer and Geraldine Anderson, a Bayview parent who recently joined Innovate’s board, said in unison, “That’s not true.” But state Department of Education data bear out the point: Although a similar percentage of students in district and charter schools are socioeconomically disadvantaged, district schools are serving about four times as many homeless children as charter schools and greater numbers of English-language learners and students with disabilities.

Thirteen charter schools operate in San Francisco, with about 4,300 students. Like all charters, they call themselves public schools and don’t charge tuition. They are not answerable to the school district, and they set their own curriculum, hiring and discipline policies. They receive state funds for every student they enroll, taking money that the local district would otherwise receive.

Across the state, 250 school districts are facing budget cuts, and charter schools — where 10 percent of public school students now attend classes — are a significant cause, according to a report released in May

by In the Public Interest, a think tank that studies the impact of privatization of public services. The proliferation of charter schools

is draining funds from districts, contributing to gaping deficits, school closings and layoffs, said the report’s author, Gordon Lafer, an economist at the University of Oregon.

Lafer examined the finances of three districts and estimated that, for the 2016-2017 school year, charter school expansion cost the Oakland Unified School District $57 million in lost revenue, forcing the district to cut back on counselors, school supplies and toilet paper. He pegged the cost to San Diego at $66 million and to Santa Clara’s East Side Union High School District at $19 million. San Diego laid off almost 400

“It’s a state of emergency, but charter schools are not the answer.”

— Shamann

Walton, District 10 supervisor-elect

teachers and East Side plans to eliminate 66 jobs over the next two years.

When students leave district schools to go to charters, it doesn’t do much to reduce expenses, which are largely fixed, but spreads them over a reduced number of students, Lafer said. The loss in revenue means many schools are forced to cut optional services like art and music classes, he said.

Lafer didn’t look at the impact of charter expansion on the finances of San Francisco’s public schools, but he has no doubt it is doing harm. “If you have a declining student population, the last thing you want to do is say, ‘Let’s open more schools,’” Lafer said.

One way to look at the impact on San Francisco is this: If the 4,315 students attending charter schools were instead going to district schools, the district would have additional revenue of about $43 million, based on the $9,865 the district gets from the state for each student enrolled. (Additional funds are provided based on the number of students who are socioeconomically deprived or have special needs.)

To Hammer, the fact that district schools may lose revenue to charters is immaterial.

“If federal and state dollars are flowing to public charter schools that are serving kids well, that is a great use of public money,” he said.

‘PUSHED OUT OF THE CITY’ At first glance, the forum held at a church in San Francisco’s Bayview district in May had the look and feel of a grassroots campaign for economic and social justice.

Young community organizers, mostly black and Latino, signed people in on Apple computers as they arrived. A man wearing a multicolored African kufi cap roamed the hall with a clipboard.

At the front of the hall, a “parent volunteer” was speaking. “I don’t know about y’all, but I’m tired of the community not having control of how it’s policed,” she said.

“I’m tired of seeing my family and friends pushed out of the city because they aren’t able to afford living here anymore. … And do you know there are schools in this city where almost none of the black students are able to read or do math at grade level?”

Another woman, alternating between English and Spanish, took a turn. “The only way we’re going to make sure our kids have a bright future is to stand together: Latinos, African-American, Pacific Islanders, whites, standing up for our kids,” she said.

“I’m originally from Mexico and all I want – todo que querido – is for my children to have a good future.”

The sentiments were sincere and heartfelt, the problems real. But the call for unity that issued from the podium stands in sharp contrast to the battle unfolding in social media and at school board hearings.

When the application for KIPP’s elementary school came before the board in November 2017, Innovate staff members and parent volunteers packed a public hearing to support KIPP’s bid and to blast the school district for failing African-American and Latino children. They asked that a “state of emergency” be declared.

“Students’ human rights are being violated,” said Anderson. “We need immediate action.”

When the public speakers were done, school board member Shamann Walton, a Bayview resident and newly elected as District 10 representative to the Board of

“Students’ human rights are being violated. We need immediate action.”

— Geraldine Anderson, Innovate Public Schools board member

including a regular Friday community circle. He said he developed the model with help from Innovate and a design team of 10 to 15 parents from the Bayview and Mission districts.

“I sat down with hundreds of parents in coffee shops and homes,” Davis said. Community involvement will be a “core value” of the proposed school, according to the school’s application.

Anderson hopes to eventually send her 7-year-old son, Kingston, to Booker academy, on whose board she sits. Last spring, she pulled him out of Charles Drew Elementary in the Bayview when a spot opened at the New School, a charter that opened last fall in Potrero Hill. She was concerned about violence at Drew and learned from Innovate about how poorly Drew students were doing in math and English. “I was in disbelief,” she said. “Are we really doing that bad?”

But Diane Gray, a Bayview resident and founder of 100% College Prep, a 20-yearold after-school program that helps neighborhood youth get ready for college, said the proposed school didn’t arise from the community. Rather, she said, Innovate developed the idea and began “pounding the pavement” to win support from Bayview parents whose children attend local public schools.

“Innovate and folks who want to open charter schools are targeting our schools and families of color, who believe that by enrolling in charter schools, they’re getting a private school education,” Gray told the Public Press.

STATE OVERRULES S.F. BOARD

‘NO CONNECTION WITH US’ Opposing the charter advocates are parents, teachers and local school board members who have been working to improve the city’s public schools, especially those serving African-American and Latino students. They charge that Innovate portrays itself as community based, but manipulates low-income parents of color, using parents’ frustration with the school system as a way to recruit kids for charter schools.

“They’re fake,” said Alison Collins, a member of the district’s African American Parent Advisory Council and co-founder of SF Families Union, which pushes for equity and improvement in public schools. “If you say you’re working with black families, you should be connected to black families in the community. But they’re not. How can you say you’re championing our issue when you have no connection with us?” Collins, a middle-school mom and former teacher, was elected in November to a seat on the San Francisco school board. Her bid was fueled in part by her anger at the incursion of charter schools.

Innovate cofounder and chief executive Matt Hammer, the son of former San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer, said his organization is “all about great public schools for low-income kids” — whether they are run by traditional school districts or by charter school operators. In the Bay Area, he said, “charter schools are serving underserved kids at a significantly higher level, providing a better education.”

State education data compiled by Innovate show that Latino and African-American students attending district-run public schools in San Francisco far lag white and Asian students in math and English scores, graduation rates and eligibility to attend state universities. And among schools with large percentages of Latinos and AfricanAmerican students, charter schools tend to rank among the highest performers, especially at the high school level.

But that paints an inaccurate picture, opponents say.

“To get into a charter, you have to navigate the application process, and the most

Supervisors, took a turn.

“There’s a record of charter schools which some of you may not know,” Walton said.

“They use our black and brown families to promote certain narratives and propaganda. They get them to start and participate in charter schools and then our most challenging students are weeded out. It’s a state of emergency, but charter schools are not the answer.”

Walton and his colleagues unanimously rejected KIPP’s application — but theirs was not the last word. KIPP appealed, and in March the 11-member State Board of Education overturned San Francisco’s decision.

The state’s decision was inappropriate, Vincent Matthews, San Francisco’s superintendent of schools, told the Public Press.

“We evaluated the charter honestly and fairly,” he said. “Those who are closer to what’s actually going on should be the ones to make the determination. I do not believe the state should be overturning local control.”

In June, this process repeated. Another proposed charter school, also backed by Innovate and intended for the Bayview, came before the school board. Backers hope to open the sixth-through-12th-grade school in the fall of 2019 and to name it for Mary L. Booker, a well-known Bayview artist and activist who died last year. The proposed school was represented by Terrence Davis, a former charter school special education teacher from San Diego who was hired by Innovate as a “school founder-in-residence.”

In an interview, Davis said the proposed school would have a social justice philosophy and use restorative justice practices,

Photo by Rob Waters // Public Press

Malcolm X Academy students and staff marched in spring to protest plans to open a charter inside the Bayview elementary school.

Bayview School Feeling Squeezed by New Charter

By Rob Waters // Public Press

M

alcolm X Academy sits atop one of the peaks that gives the Bayview district its name. It has commanding views of the bay and downtown San Francisco. The front of the school is decorated with brightly colored murals of the school’s namesake, maps of Africa and the motto of both the slain black leader and the school: “By any means necessary.”

That motto is being tested as the school and its 105 students — up from 90 last year — share space with 90 prekindergartners, kindergartners and firstgraders attending a new charter school in the same building, KIPP Bayview Elementary.

Thirty-one years ago — when teacher Gina Bissell began working at Malcolm X, and the district still bused children to achieve racial balance — it had more than 400 students and was ethnically diverse. For the past seven years, its census has fluctuated between 90 and 120, according to former Principal Elena Rosen, who left the school in June. About 70 percent of students are African-American.

On an overcast Thursday morning in May, a group of children in red shirts walked up the path to the school, holding onto a long belt and their teachers’ hands. They came from a neighborhood preschool to get a glimpse of the school they would soon attend — a way to help them feel comfortable, Rosen explained.

She welcomed them and led them down the hall to join a kindergarten class for circle time.

After a few minutes, the kids headed

to recess, each kindergartner holding hands with a preschool buddy. While the kids romped on the large school playground, kicking balls, tossing Frisbees and jumping off a climbing structure, Bissell offered a reporter a school tour.

Bissell, a reading recovery teacher, showed off her room, a corner space with bookshelves, posters and a small table for working with kids one-on-one or in small groups. Every day, she pulls 15 to 18 kids who are reading below grade level out of their regular classroom to help them. Although this work could happen on the sidelines of classes, that can cause “noise and interruptions — and students less focused on learning,” she said.

Since KIPP moved in and took over six classrooms, Bissell is sharing her space with a Malcolm X resource teacher who helps children with special needs. Their meetings are supposed to be confidential, so Bissell and her colleague must figure out how to manage the space and protect the children’s privacy.

As Bissell talked, a thin 8-year-old boy — we’ll call him Derrick — came in and gave Bissell a hug. He had transferred to Malcolm X six months earlier and has since moved up four reading levels. “I get a lot of help from Miss Bissell,” he said.

“She’s my favorite teacher.”

At his old school, he said, he had stomachaches and got in trouble for staying too long in the bathroom, ending up with six suspensions. Now, he likes coming to school.

Bissell worries that the strict behavioral rules employed in many charter schools won’t work for kids like Derrick.

“It’s too rigid,” Bissell said. “He’s thriving in an environment where it’s more

engaging and activated. He’s built trusting relationships with adults and wants to be here.”

On the second floor, an outdoor education classroom used four days a week was lined with seedlings and potting soil.

Two doors down, a therapist worked oneon-one with a child. These classrooms, and others used last year by Malcolm X’s afterschool program, have been turned over to KIPP. Malcolm X has made progress in recent years. By the end of last year, 72 percent of Malcolm X students were reading at or above grade level, up from 55 percent in previous years, Rosen said, the result of experienced, collaborative staff members providing intensive resources and forging partnerships with community programs.

“We’re seeing systematic growth in our reading data,” she said. “We’re closing the gap.”

The sudden decision last May to place KIPP at Malcolm X left staff, students and parents feeling anxiety and worried that some of their fragile progress may be undermined. “It’s hard to share our space,” said librarian Deirdre Elmansoumi. “But we are trying to be cordial and make the most of it.”

Despite the tension, Malcolm X’s new principal, Marco Taylor, and KIPP Principal Allie Welch each pledge to be cordial, professional and positive. “We are committed to being good neighbors,” Welch said in an email to the Public Press. That may get more difficult in the years ahead as KIPP tries to expand, adding one grade each year for the next three years on the way to becoming a pre-kindergarten to fourth-grade school.

As it had with KIPP, the board unanimously rejected the Booker application.

The school appealed to the State Board of Education, which unanimously overturned San Francisco’s decision in early November, following a recommendation a month before by the state Advisory Commission on Charter Schools.

The commission is stacked with charter school supporters, said Clare Crawford, a senior policy adviser with In the Public Interest. Five of its eight members are current or former staff members of charter schools, and it votes in favor of charters most of the time, she said. The State Board of Education, whose members are appointed by the governor, has also been highly pro-charter, overturning rejections by local school boards 72 percent of the time charter applicants file appeals, according to an analysis by In the Public Interest.

Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom has suggested he would bring more balance to state charter policies. His Democratic opponent in the June primary, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, received more than $22.5 million from a pro-charter independent expenditure committee, including $7.5 million from Netflix founder Reed Hastings, a member of KIPP’s board of directors. As Villaraigosa faded in the days before the primary, Hastings hedged his bets with a $29,200 donation to Newsom.

Advocates hope to revise the state’s charter school law to force charter schools to be more transparent in their operations and to make it easier for local school districts to monitor and reject them. Some are calling for a moratorium on the creation of charters. In San Francisco, school board member Sanchez has more modest goals.

He introduced a resolution in June calling for the district to increase its oversight of charters by tracking the number of homeless, newcomer and special-need students; to analyze the district’s loss of revenue to charter schools; and to track the suspension, expulsion and disciplinary policies of charters.

“To put it bluntly, state laws around charters really disadvantage local districts,” Sanchez said. “We’re at a point where we need to take a break and assess the impact of charter schools in San Francisco.”

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 9

City’s Largest Landlord Under Fire From Tenants VERITAS from Page 1

ings when new tenants move in. “If we’re able to repeal Costa-Hawkins and look at the vacancy-control option, then that gets at the root of their business model.”

Hirn described the strategy as “speculative acquisition.” That means that “to pay back the loans they’ve taken out to buy and rehab these buildings, they have to raise the rent on existing rent-controlled tenants through a variety of ways, or they just have to get them out.”

“This is not a new business model,” said Hirn. “But they’re just doing it on a scale, and with a sophistication in San Francisco that I don’t think we’ve seen before.”

But housing advocates were dealt a big blow in November, when voters overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 10.

HARASSMENT COMPLAINTS In a survey the Housing Rights Committee circulated among 75 Veritas tenants, nearly half reported “receiving a three-day notice that seemed unwarranted, baseless or unfair,” whereas just over half claimed that they, or someone in their household, had suffered a physical ailment or health issue, as a result of construction. Nearly 40 percent of those surveyed said they had to temporarily vacate their units because of construction, almost always without the required advance written notice.

The committee has testified before the Rent Board to raise ethical concerns about Veritas’ practice of contracting with companies founded or run by family members.

“We see a lot of inflated costs, potentially frauduLandlords lent costs and also we see vs. their web of contractors, Renters which is really problematic,” said Hirn. “They create these shell companies that are owned by family members of the CEO and they circulate money within themselves.”

Sixty-eight tenants in 30 buildings sued Veritas Investments Inc. on Oct. 11, 2018, accusing San Francisco’s largest landlord of illegal and unfair business practices intended to force seniors and other long-term residents from rent-controlled apartments.

Lawsuits have also been filed by tenants in two other Veritas buildings.

Among the allegations are that Veritas Investments and its CEO, Yat-Pang Au, have harassed tenants with extended shutoffs of power, gas and water; engaged in disruptive, incomplete or shoddy construction; violated San Francisco Rent Board regulations on temporary evictions for repairs; and tried to raise rents with questionable pass-through costs or by assessing tenants for interest costs on high-rate loans Veritas secured for its portfolio of more than 300 buildings.

“We have not been served, so we cannot respond to allegations we haven’t seen.

However, we dispute all claims that we are hostile or negligent toward our valued residents in any way,” Veritas Chief Operating Officer Justin Sato said in a statement, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

HOUSING

SOLUTIONS

Photos by Yesica Prado // Public Press

In Huntington Park, on Nob Hill, Father John Jimenez and John Dessing joined in a September memorial to pay respects to tenants who died after evictions from Veritas buildings.

THE VERITAS STORY Veritas became San Francisco’s largest residential and commercial property owner in 2011 when it purchased a massive portfolio of housing from notorious CitiApartments, which reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with the city attorney over allegations it harassed tenants and did not make repairs. Veritas specializes in purchasing old, rent-controlled properties and rehabbing them for high-end renters. The firm says it manages nearly $2 billion in real estate assets in San Francisco and the Bay Area overall, with almost 200 apartment buildings in San Francisco, mostly 20 to 50 units. Its “vertically integrated business” includes RentSFNow and Greentree Property Management.

Although rent control benefits Veritas by depressing the purchase price of the properties, it restricts the company’s ability to raise rents to meet profit targets. That’s

Members of the Do No Harm Coalition, which is made up of health professionals and activists, marched from Huntington Park across the street as part of the protest.

Gunvant Shah with the “award” tenant advocates attempted to present to Veritas Investments CEO Yat-Pang Au at the Fairmont hotel.

THE ROLE OF ‘PASS-THROUGHS’

“The incentive to pressure tenants to leave is created by ‘vacancy decontrol.’”

— Brad Hirn, Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco

why, overall, Au has said rent control constrains his ability make upgrades and reduces the supply of modern housing.

It requires landlords to wait for units to turn over to higher-paying tenants, or, as tenants-rights advocates contend, to pressure them to leave.

“Investors are realizing that upgraded, classic buildings offer residents the unique, non-cookie-cutter, amenity-rich lifestyle in great demand today,” Au wrote in 2017 in the trade publication Multi-Housing News.

“These types of properties form a highly valued and appreciating asset class that, due to its desirability and stability, can provide excellent returns for our investors due to the lower initial cost and significant potential return. And because smaller properties are generally owned by smaller, individual entities, it’s exceedingly difficult for newcomers to aggregate portfolios of a meaningful size to take advantage of the economies of scale.”

Veritas did not respond directly to requests for comment about its business or allegations involving tenants. Violation

change Commission for a loan financing 44 Veritas properties throughout San Francisco offers one window into Veritas’ business model. It shows just under 99 percent of the units were occupied when Veritas bought the buildings. It also shows that the company “has achieved an annual turnover of 30.7 percent of total units.” In other words, Veritas replaced nearly one third of its tenants in a year. When a unit turns over, the rent increases, on average, by 466 percent.

About 25 protesters showed up atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill in late September to sound off about treatment of rent-controlled tenants and their living conditions.

Radar, a firm Veritas pays to track building code complaints and violations, said in an email that “Veritas has a lower-thanaverage rate” compared with other San Francisco landlords.

‘MOST PROACTIVE’ WITH COMPLAINTS Because of its size, Veritas “may well have a higher total number because most of San Francisco’s rental property is owned by small, mom-and-pop owners,” wrote Devon Bradley, of San Francisco-based Violation Radar. “When compared to large property owners, it is a fact that Veritas is

the most proactive and has the best track record at responding to, and resolving, such complaints.”

He added that “I’ve noticed a greater than 10% decrease in active building code violations against Veritas properties over the past year.”

There is little public data available for Veritas’ properties. That is because each building is its own limited liability company, and there is no requirement that landlords report to local officials all buildings they own under a single entity.

A 2013 structural and collateral term sheet filed with the Securities and Ex-

The Housing Rights Committee’s Hirn cited a host of what he called “abusive” practices, including unlawful rent hikes, habitability code violations, eviction threats and unsafe construction zones.

Lawsuits have been filed on behalf of tenants in two buildings: 634 Powell St. and 300 Buchanan St. These suits focus on violations of Section 37.10B of the city rent ordinance, arguing that Veritas’ behavior amounts to tenant harassment.

Central to these lawsuits are allegations that Veritas has exploited regulations about so-called rental pass-throughs.

Landlords may petition the Rent Board to increase tenants’ rents if the cost of operating the building exceeds the amount the landlords receive in rent. Pass-throughs can legally and permanently increase tenants’ rents by as much as 7 percent of their base rent.

Rent Board Executive Director Robert Collins said his agency received passthrough petitions on 1,161 units last year, a fivefold increase from a decade ago, when only 228 units had petitioned. Veritas was targeted during public debate in May, when the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed legislation cracking down on landlords that exploit the law to pass along the cost of loans and property taxes, rather than improvements.

“The goal of pushing these costs onto tenants is to price them out of their units so they can be re-rented out at market rates,” former District 8 Supervisor Jeff Sheehy said at the time.

However, these new laws do not address some of the pass-through violations alleged in the lawsuits filed against Veritas.

CITY ATTORNEY APPROACHED “We have evidence of them passing on costs from renovations on other units,” said Hirn. “In fact, we have evidence of them passing on costs from renovations in other buildings. They’ve even passed through the costs of correcting housing code violations, which is illegal.”

The Housing Rights Committee, along with Veritas tenants, approached the City Attorney’s Office about taking action against the company. Spokesman John Coté would not say whether the city attorney is investigating, stating that investigations are confidential.

“Tenants have no power.

We need more protection.”

— Gunvant Shah, Veritas Investments tenant

After the activists’ protest at the “Spirit of Life” award ceremony, Veritas tenant Gunvant Shah said that rather than make philanthropic donations, his landlord “should take care of our tenants first.”

Shah has lived at 698 Bush St. for over 40 years.

“I paid for their mortgages,” he said.

“And I have to go to food banks. The conditions I live in … in my old age, I’m living disgracefully.”

Shah’s building has 46 units, 17 of which are single-room occupancies with shared bathrooms. He said that unsafe construction had exposed him and his neighbors to asbestos, lead and other toxins. “I have lead poisoning — 10.9 percent in my blood,” he said.

Shah campaigned to pass Proposition 10 and expand rent control. “Tenants have no power,” he said. “We need more protection.”

10 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019

Even Today, Academia Knows Little About Rent Control

“A significant negative economic risk not included in our direct analysis is that larger businesses may relocate or expand in other cities as a result of the tax.”

— San

Francisco controller’s office

Data-driven research to support policy arguments is lacking

ally have data to back up their claims,” she said.

Partly, that’s because good data can be hard to come by. A well-known study in Cambridge, Mass., for example, drew no direct conclusions about whether a landmark 1994 repeal of rent control actually affected rents — because the researchers

By Nathan Collins // Public Press could not find data on rents, said co-author and Massachusetts Institute of Technology s Californians battled this fall over a economist Parag Parthak. A 2007 study ballot measure to allow cities much that did focus on rents themselves relied on wider leeway to impose all sorts of surveying a sample of renters rather than rent control, both sides of the debate complete, official records. And then there’s threw around citations to academic papers, the San Francisco study, which cobbled toeconomic studies and seemingly compelling gether the needed data from three different statistics. The studies, they said, proved sources. that restricting what landlords may charge In many cases, especially in older studies, tenants either helps preserve affordable the data did not allow direct comparisons housing or exacerbates the crisis by driving between different kinds of rent conowners out of the rental business trol, or between rent-controlled and and killing off construction. market-rate homes. As a result, Both sides were wrong. There Diamond said, those studies may just isn’t enough careful, data-drivsay more about the circumstances en economic research to definitively — social, economic and political — answer questions about rent control in one particular place and time as it applies to the here and now. than they do about rent control.

There are two things we know Several studies of rent control in for sure — and that researchers Europe during and shortly after agree on — about rent control: It World War II showed rent control keeps rents below market rates for Landlords could reduce rental housing stock those who have it and it helps keep vs. (and the quality of what remained). people in their homes longer. There Renters But, Garcia said, those studies is also evidence that rent control concerned “hard” rent controls that can shrink the supply of housing, at severely restricted and in some cases halted least in some cases. rent increases, and that bear little resemThat leaves open two of the most imporblance to any policy in place in California tant questions in a debate that stretches — meaning their conclusions probably do back decades: How do different rent control not apply. policies affect the supply of housing, and To a lesser extent, similar concerns may how does rent control in one place affect apply to the recent San Francisco study. regional housing markets?

Although well regarded among researchers, As a review of research on rent control it is still just one study of one policy at one and interviews with policy experts and point in time. “I think it’s useful, but it’s economists suggest, there is much that one point,” Garcia said. remains unclear. In the centuries — yes, centuries — since rent control began, the ASSESSING REGIONAL IMPACT number of policies that have been proposed or implemented has dwarfed the number Another pressing problem is that it isn’t of reliable studies of modern rent control, clear what rent control policies do on the which researchers said number fewer than scale of individual blocks and neighborhalf a dozen, although even on that number hoods, what they do to other kinds of housthere was some disagreement. ing or how one city’s policy might affect a Economists and policy experts say there regional housing market. If there are few is just not much data on rents and tenant good studies of rent control generally, there and landlord decisions on which to base are even fewer of those kinds of spillover quality research. On top of that, said David effects.

Sims, an economist at Brigham Young UniThere are some hints, perhaps, from versity, academics have moved on to other, research like Parthak and colleagues’ study more novel questions in recent decades. in Cambridge. They found that ending that Economists produced dozens of studies city’s rent control, which had applied to all of rent controls put in place after World rentals, raised property values on other War II, but having reached some concluhomes in the city. But, again, the Camsions about those policies’ effects, the field bridge policy is very different from anything moved on. Whatever the underlying reason, on the books in California. For one thing, researchers do not know enough — or at Cambridge’s law limited rent increases beleast everything they would like to know — tween tenancies, a policy known as vacancy about what any one policy proposal is likely control. California’s Costa-Hawkins Rental to do to housing costs in a city, a region or Housing Act outlawed vacancy control, but a state.

Proposition 10 would have done away with that restriction had it passed, allowing San EFFECT ON HOUSING SUPPLY Francisco and other cities to start experimenting with the idea, if at all.

Another consequence, as a recent UniverSimilarly, although it is possible that sity of Southern California report suggests, changing policy in one city affects housis that many of the most strident claims ing supply and prices in nearby cities, it about rent control may be based less on remains less than clear what and how solid research and more on the ideology large those effects would be. What would and self-interest of advocates who cite the a rent control change in San Francisco do research. to homes in the East Bay? “I would love to “It’s an incredibly complex issue,” said know more about spillovers, but that’s a David Garcia, policy director at the Terner very difficult problem empirically,” Sims Center for Housing Innovation at the said. “Measuring it is very hard.”

University of California, Berkeley. “We don’t have really good research that tells us SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES what actually happens when we do different kinds of rent control.”

Another matter that is not well unThe question of how rent control affects derstood is sorting out who ends up in the housing supply is a case study in the rent-controlled housing. Studies are few challenges rent control debates face: limited and might not apply to California, again data and studies that, even if they were because of policy differences. reliable when published, no longer apply.

But a deeper question — one that gets The best evidence to date on one aspect even less attention in some debates — is of housing supply — whether landlords rewhether there are alternatives beyond move rental units from the market — comes variations on rent control itself, such as from a study that Stanford Graduate School “rolling” rent control, in which rent restricof Business economists Rebecca Diamond, tions on newly developed homes kick in Timothy McQuade and Franklin Qian pubafter a waiting period of some years. The lished in 2018. That study concluded that Public Press reported in August that many rent-controlled buildings in San Francisco rent control advocates and detractors have were about 8 percent more likely to be not even thought enough about rolling rent converted to for-sale tenancy-in-common control to have an opinion about how it buildings or condominiums compared with might work. those that were not rent controlled.

A May 2018 Terner Center brief suggested two possibilities. In one, governSTUDY USED DETAILED DATA ments could use tax incentives to encourage property owners to create affordable Their approach is notable for two reahousing and preserve what is already out sons. First, they relied on a “natural there, similar to policies put in place in experiment,” that is, a change in the law Seattle and Tacoma, Wash. Authorities that created a test group as well as a very could also create a statewide “anti-gouging” similar control group to compare it with. cap setting a maximum increase above In 1994, San Francisco updated its rent orthe Consumer Price Index and apply to all dinance to bring owner-occupied buildings rental properties, regardless of when they with four or fewer units under rent control, were built. That idea would be possible but only those built before 1979, when city only if Costa-Hawkins is repealed by voters regulations were enacted. through Proposition 10 or by the LegislaSecond, the team had detailed data, ture, if that fails. including individuals’ address history from And there may be a deeper problem still, Infutor, property histories from DataQuick one that has received very little attention: (now part of CoreLogic), and building perThe housing crisis California finds itself in mit and parcel histories from the San Franis much more complex than the problems cisco Office of Assessor-Recorder and the of any one city and more complex than dePlanning Department. From those data, bates about rent control itself. “Rent control the researchers knew how long individuals is designed to solve a symptom — prices lived at any one address and what hapare high,” said Sims, the Brigham Young pened to a building after someone moved economist. out.

The problem, then, may be that not By putting those together, they could enough is being done, by governments or compare two groups of homes that were developers, to create new housing, and nearly the same, except that one was rent that efforts to do so are too local and too controlled and one was not — in other patchwork to solve what is fundamentally words, one of the cleanest possible ways to a regional problem. That the problem is estimate the effects of housing supply. divided into small pieces when it requires a Unfortunately, in that regard, Diamond wide-ranging solution, Sims said, “is what said, her study was almost alone. “I think drives this.” there are only a handful of papers that re-

A

HOUSING

SOLUTIONS

Photo by Judith Calson // Public Press

If implemented, Proposition C would direct money to homelessness outreach and prevention, as the city continues to clear encampments.

Homelessness Fund Might Render More Services if Measure Stands PROP C from Page 1

homelessness programs. In a scenario where the annual revenue reached $250 million, the low-end projection, it would provide assistance an estimated 103,000 times in a 10-year period. This would be total services rendered, not unique individuals served. It counts people for as many times as they receive any type of housing or social service.

••That estimate, however, is 40,000 more instances than the official 63,000 figure published by the controller’s office in September. The city’s chief economist did not include the number of people who could receive mental and behavioral health services, a figure that Friedenbach said she got from the city’s former health director. The controller’s report did not explain the omission.

••Friedenbach, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition on Homelessness, estimated that the public health department could provide mental and behavioral health services in about 4,000 instances per year over 10 years, and more if the tax revenue were higher. These services would absorb at least one-quarter of the Proposition C revenue.

BOARD CAN ADJUST SPENDING Any predictions of the levels of service Proposition C would make possible should be treated as ballpark estimates, despite granular breakdowns contained in the math of the controller and the proponents.

The Board of Supervisors would be able to adjust how the additional tax revenue was spent, within limits, affecting the number of people who received certain types of housing or social services. Under California law, all local tax increases require voter approval. Because Proposition C has no sunset provision, its mandates would remain in effect unless repealed.

Proposition C, which was put on the ballot by signature petitions, has riven San Francisco’s political leadership and the city’s business and technology moguls. The measure’s supporters included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, congresswomen Nancy Pelosi and Jackie Speier, and state Assemblyman Phil Ting. It also had backing from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ progressive members, as well as new supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Vallie Brown.

They argued that the scale and persistence of the homelessness crisis merited tapping the city’s deepest pockets for this additional funding.

THE OPPOSITION The opposition was led by San Francisco Mayor London Breed, state lawmakers Scott Wiener and David Chiu, the Chamber of Commerce, venture capitalist Ron Conway and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who is also the CEO of Square.

They claimed it would be a giant jobkiller and drive companies out, attract more homeless people, have no spending accountability and complicate future funding because of the lawsuit challenging all signature-driven tax measures.

The measure would raise the gross receipts tax on local businesses with annual revenues greater than $50 million. The tax would vary according to the type of business — 0.175 percent to 0.690 percent — and would generate between $250 million and $300 million in additional

PROP. C BENEFICIARIES ECLIPSE JOBS LOST Over the next 10 years, Proposition C would fund housing and services in 103,000 instances. Net jobs lost would be fewer than 400.

SERVICES RENDERED

40,000

35,000

30,000

25,000

20,000

15,000

10,000

5,000

0 Jobs lost

Shelter beds Housing

EMPLOYMENT

*Mental health care Homelessness prevention services

HOMELESSNESS PROGRAMS

TYPE OF IMPACT Graphic by Noah Arroyo, Reid Brown // Public Press

tax revenue each year, according to the controller’s report, which was assembled by the city’s chief economist, Ted Egan.

The tax would affect between 300 and 400 local businesses. They make up 3 percent of companies paying the gross receipts tax, and have paid 57 percent of all business tax revenue citywide. With Proposition C, their share would grow to 67 percent. This would make San Francisco’s business tax structure more progressive, hitting larger companies harder than smaller ones, the controller’s report concluded.

But the additional gross receipts tax could cause an estimated net loss of between 725 and 875 jobs citywide over the next 20 years, the report said, adding that it was “difficult to quantify” whether companies might relocate all or some of their operations.

“A significant negative economic risk not included in our direct analysis is that larger businesses may relocate or expand in other cities as a result of the tax, which will raise the cost of doing business in San Francisco,” the report cautioned. “To the extent that this relocation occurs, economic impacts could be more negative than we project.”

Also, companies leaving the city “would have negative multiplier effects on other industries,” the report added.

But it also noted that last year’s cutting of the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent “would outweigh the proposed 0.5% gross receipts tax increase for the majority” of affected companies.

And not all of the controller’s economic forecasts of the new tax on the local economy were negative.

“Additional positive factors, not quantified in this analysis, include an expected improvement in health outcomes, a reduction in acute service costs, and an attractiveness of the City, because of the likely

Sources: San Francisco controller’s office; *mental health estimates from former director, S.F. Public Health Department

PROP C continued on Page 11

NEW TAX WOULD BRUISE MANY INDUSTRIES, HELP SOME In the next 20 years, the gross receipts tax from Proposition C would hurt retail trade most, while causing growth in health care and social assistance. Only major industries are shown.

JOB LOSSES -183

JOB GAINS

Retail trade -146

Accommodation and food services

-133

Finance and insurance

-131

Professional, scientific, and technical services

-117

Management of companies and enterprises -95

Construction

-86

Information

-84

Other services (except public administration) Admin, support, waste management and remediation

-70 -49

Real estate and rental and leasing

-39

Arts, entertainment, and recreation

-33

Manufacturing

-32

Wholesale trade

-32

Educational services; private

-29

Transportation and warehousing

State and local government Health care and social assistance Source: San Francisco controller’s office

126 309 Graphic by Reid Brown // Public Press

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 11

Same Donors Opposed Homelessness Funds, Backed 2016 Tent Ban Venture capitalists and PACs pushed their business interests

Opposing Proposition C (from left): venture capitalists Michael Moritz and Matt Cohler, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

By Andrew Perez // MapLight

D

Photo by Judith Calson // Public Press

Sean Pico (right) helped move a friend’s box dwelling in Potrero Hill in 2017. Pico became homeless after coming to San Francisco to take care of a friend who had cancer.

S.F. Supervisors Could Shift Homelessness Spending staffing, duration and frequency of treatment. We don’t find it useful to create an average, so we don’t have that information available.”

PROP C from Page 10

decline in the homeless population,” the report stated. “To the extent that these policy objectives are achieved, the economic impact could be better than we project.”

Further, increased spending on housing and related services “will stimulate those sectors of the economy, leading to positive multiplier effects on other industries.” But the controller’s office said it was “unable to quantify the fiscal or economic benefits of these expected improvements.”

Officially, based on the most recent biennial point-in-time headcount in 2017, an average of about 7,500 people reside on the city’s streets or in shelters. That figure certainly underplays the SOLVING number of people expeHOMELESSNESS riencing homelessness, however. Jeff Kositsky, director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, has said that his office serves about 20,000 people per year, many of whom are marginally housed during part of any year and need services to prevent them from losing a roof over their heads.

For the previous fiscal year, which ended June 30, the homelessness department spent about $250 million, according to documents provided to the Public Press.

The controller’s analysis of Proposition C said total spending on homelessness services for all relevant departments reached $380 million over the same period.

QUESTIONING ACCOUNTABILITY With the city’s current annual homelessness outlay of more than a third of a billion dollars, how that money and future funds would be spent was one of the opposition’s biggest talking points.

The No on Prop C campaign argued that the measure lacked “accountability,” in part because it “has no detailed plan for how the money would be distributed.”

Although that is a matter of interpretation, the proposition’s text does outline an oversight structure. The measure does not mandate that each type of tax-funded housing and social service go to specific quotas of recipients. Instead, it requires that proportions of revenue go toward general categories of assistance: Photo by Noah Arroyo // Public Press

At least 50 percent of Proposition C funding is targeted for getting homeless people like Elizabeth Strommer into permanent housing.

HOW MANY MIGHT BENEFIT? Friedenbach, who headed the Yes on C campaign, said she drafted the measure earlier this year while consulting with the heads of the city departments that would spend the tax revenue if voters approved it. She asked for data that would help her craft the language, which she offered them for feedback. These conversations enabled her to estimate the number of people who might benefit from the measure’s funding.

She said she spoke with Kate Hartley, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development; Kositsky, of the homelessness department; and Barbara Garcia, the former director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Garcia resigned in August.

Hartley declined to say whether she and Friedenbach discussed the measure.

“I can’t really speak to this, because the mayor has taken a position on it, and that speaks for itself,” Hartley said.

Kositsky confirmed that Friedenbach reached out to him. “Yes, Jenny asked for budget and other information that I would provide to anyone who would ask,” he said.

“How she used it, I don’t know.” Kositsky did not state a position on Proposition C, although he donated $500 to the pro-C campaign in June.

Garcia confirmed that Friedenbach had talked to her about “the amounts of dollars they were looking for, the types of oversight, the services.”

“It was a significant amount of dollars for services,” Garcia told the Public Press.

When asked if she had an opinion about that level of spending, and what it might let the health department accomplish, she

Photo by Judith Calson // Public Press

Jonathan Mesa (left) and Edwin Marangco were residents of “Box City,” a Potrero Hill encampment dismantled in 2017. Mesa previously stayed in temporary shelter, but went back to the streets when permanent housing did not become available. said, “I’m not going to go into details about that. I’m not in a position to say, since I’m not at the department anymore.”

Friedenbach later told the Public Press that Garcia provided the estimate of the number of times a year the health department could render mental and behavioral health services: 4,000 to 5,000. Garcia did not respond to Public Press attempts to verify the exchange, which Friedenbach said occurred via text message in late July.

The controller’s office projected that Proposition C would create “$60-$75 million in new funding, annually, for outreach and mental health treatment.” That range corresponds with scenarios in which the tax earned the minimum and maximum annual revenue. Therefore, using Gar-

cia’s estimate of services rendered, health care recipients would cost the city about $15,000 per person.

But that calculation might actually be very low, a confidential source with knowledge of homelessness and mental health programs told the Public Press. If correct, and the per-client cost were higher, then spending on mental and behavioral health would help fewer people.

The health department would not provide an estimate on the basis of averages over all services.

“We don’t calculate per patient/client costs for any of these programs,” communications director Rachael Kagan said in an email to the Public Press. “There is extensive variability in the type of services each patient requires, including the type of

••At least 50 percent for getting homeless people into housing. This would primarily include acquiring, creating or rehabilitating permanently affordable housing where the tenants receive social services on site, though up to 12 percent of this money could go toward the city’s rapid rehousing program — rental subsidies lasting up to five years, for people who have recently become homeless.

••Of all the beneficiaries of these types of spending, at least 25 percent must be families, and at least 20 percent must be “homeless youth” — adults 18 to 29. (See the spring 2018 Public Press special report on rapid rehousing, “Most Homeless Families Helped by City Rent Programs Move Out of S.F.” Find it online: sfpr.es/ i24-rehousing.)

••At least 25 percent for mental and behavioral health services. This could include street-based care, substanceabuse treatment and medications, and intensive case management.

••Up to 15 percent for programs designed to prevent homelessness, such as legal assistance or help paying a security deposit or utility bill.

••Up to 10 percent for temporary beds, likely in shelters or navigation centers, as well as for public bathrooms or programs to improve hygiene.

All new revenue would go into a dedicated fund, not the city’s general fund.

The Board of Supervisors could shift these proportions by pulling funds from the other categories to bolster spending on housing or mental health programs. The board’s political alignment changed Nov. 6, with progressives gaining solid control of the 11-member body. It’s not yet clear how that shift might affect funding decisions when they take their seats in January.

The board would receive spending advice from a nine-member oversight committee, as mandated by Proposition C. The board would appoint four members, the mayor would appoint four and the city controller would appoint one.

These expenditures could only supplement, not replace, the city’s other homelessness spending.

An expanded version of this article ran Nov. 5, 2018, at sfpublicpress.org

onors that opposed a ballot measure to fund more homeless services in San Francisco with a new tax on the city’s wealthiest companies previously bankrolled a successful 2016 initiative to ban tent encampments in the city.

Proposition C, which San Francisco voters passed Nov. 6, will almost double the city’s annual homelessness budget by increasing the gross receipts tax by an average of 0.5 percent for businesses with more than $50 million in annual revenue. Supporters contend the initiative will provide housing and new shelter beds for thousands of homeless people over 10 years. It also will fund mental health and addiction programs. Some financial services companies could pay a higher tax than other businesses under the proposal and came out against the measure.

The campaign against Proposition C received almost $550,000 from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee; the Hotel Council of San Francisco PAC; venture capitalist Michael Moritz; and the Committee on Jobs Government Reform Fund, which represents business interests in the city. Those same donors contributed almost $600,000 to support Proposition Q, a 2016 initiative that allows the city to clear homeless encampments from sidewalks as long as residents are offered a bed at a shelter or a bus ticket to leave San Francisco.

“Proposition C opponents can easily be described as wealthy, tone-deaf, selfinterested, and heartless, even if they have been longtime donors to homeless causes,” Moritz, a billionaire, wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal column. In 2016, he donated $49,999 in support of Proposition Q. California is one of the wealthiest states in the country and has the highest poverty rate in the United States when cost of living is considered. The disparity is especially pronounced in the Bay Area, home to the nation’s booming tech industry and a spectacular housing shortage. Despite San Francisco’s reputation as a liberal utopia, a United Nations special report published in September found that the city’s efforts to criminalize homelessness and break up encampments constitute “cruel and inhuman treatment” and violate human rights.

Although Proposition C’s proponents significantly out-raised their opponents, the measure has split San Francisco’s business community.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, a major San Francisco employer, donated more than $2 In support of million to support the iniProp C: Salestiative, and his company force CEO gave $5.9 million. Local Marc Benioff payment processing companies Square and Stripe opposed the initiative, arguing they would be hit hard because the city classifies them as financial services companies — which would be taxed at higher rates — and not as tech companies.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Proposition C “puts the cart before the horse and then sends both down a dead-end street.”

Several top Breed supporters also opposed Proposition C. Progress San Francisco, a super PAC that supported Breed, received $335,000 from investor Paul Graham and the Committee on Jobs Government Reform Fund. Graham and the committee donated $260,000 to a committee opposing Proposition C. Venture capitalist Matt Cohler, who donated $80,000 to Progress San Francisco, contributed $5,000 to fight the measure.

Safe & Affordable San Francisco, a PAC that gave $20,000 to Breed’s campaign, also contributed $7,500 to the anti-Proposition C effort.

MapLight is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that reveals the influence of money in politics, informs voters and advances democratic reforms.

CROSSWORD PUZZLE SOLUTION FROM PAGE 2

12 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2019

State Law Cracks Down on Free Meals Food-sharing group’s efforts to feed the hungry face new obstacles

By Yesica Prado // Public Press

U

nder a golden September sky, surrounded by the endless Mission District din, nine hungry people lined up behind a white table at the 16th Street BART station, waiting for a Thursday evening meal.

Cecylian Tiogone, a Food Not Bombs volunteer, smiled as she pushed a grocery cart full of rattling pots into the southwest corner of the plaza, setting up to share the week’s free offering: sautéed veggies, white rice, lentils, bread, green salad, fruit salad and baked pears encrusted with granola.

The all-volunteer global movement collects surplus food from grocery stores, bakeries, markets and local farmers, sharing free vegan or vegetarian meals as a protest against war and poverty.

Many unhoused residents depend on this humanitarian aid to survive. But state regulations taking effect in January jeopardize Food Not Bombs’ 35-year mission of sharing food outside the confines of government bureaucracy.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 2178 into law on Sept. 18.

It forbids so-called limited service charitable organizations from serving SOLVING HOMELESSNESS food in plazas, parks and other public spaces without a permit. Local officials may confiscate the food and cite the organization with a misdemeanor.

Assembly member Monique Limon, D-Santa Barbara, introduced the bill in response to complaints to local health departments about community groups feeding the hungry, making people ill. Opponents, including Hunger Action LA, argued unsuccessfully that no data backed up the claims of widespread food-borne illnesses.

The law expands the definition of a food facility, which is regulated under the Retail Food Code, to include charitable groups “whose purpose is to feed food-insecure individuals.”

Excluded from the law are food banks, cottage food operations, churches, private clubs or nonprofits that give away or sell food no more than three days in any 90-day period.

Other exclusions cover “temporary food facilities” that operate from a fixed location or a swap meet, and “nonprofit charitable temporary food facilities” in which student clubs or organizations operate under the authorization of a school or other educational facility.

In addition, food sharing is limited to distributing whole, uncut produce and food inside its original packing, reheating commercially prepared foods and distributing commercially prepared cold or frozen foods. Home-cooked meals not prepared in a commercial kitchen are forbidden.

But Food Not Bombs does not define itself as a “charitable organization” and meets none of the requirements for an exemption. The volunteers bear the costs for feeding the unsheltered, unless the group collaborates with a local food bank and works under the food bank’s permit and supervision.

As the name suggests, Food Not Bombs “is a criticism and protest of the grossly misguided priorities of the political economy,” said Eddie Steele, coordinator for the San Francisco chapter. The group shares food “in order to fulfill a basic human need currently unmet

by U.S. society.”

On the chapter’s website he writes that the new law “is potentially a weapon for those who want to erase the homeless from the streets and punish people who are helping the homeless. These groups are filling a critical gap, and criminalizing their volunteerism will only add to the misery that the state itself is struggling to find the resources to address.”

Steele noted an apparent double standard.

“You can have a barbecue and share with others in the park, and you don’t have the health department

Photos by Yesica Prado // Public Press

Above: Stephanie Le helping to serve meals at the 16th and Mission Street BART plaza in late September. She and other Food Not Bombs workers dish out free vegetarian food every Thursday.

Left: Volunteers Marcos Cruz and Cecylian Tiogone pushing their steel pots back to the group’s home after another weekly feeding.

Far left: Cecilyan Tigone handing out a homecooked meal plate, including steamed vegetables, white rice, lentils and fruit salad.

The group shares food “in order to fulfill a basic human need currently unmet by U.S. society.”

— Eddie Steele, Food Not Bombs, San Francisco chapter telling you to stop,” he said in an interview. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Steele added that “there has never been a report of food poisoning or other illness” resulting from the group’s operations.

Food Not Bombs is fighting for an exemption. The last Senate amendment before final passage in August might make its case.

Senators deleted language that would have allowed local health officials to “temporarily suspend the registration of limited service charitable feeding operations during a state of emergency.” San Francisco declared a Homeless State of Emergency in 2016, and other Bay Area cities have followed.

Food Not Bombs chapters in California met in Oakland over the Veterans Day weekend to strategize a

statewide response to the new law.

In San Francisco, there are 196 food pantries that serve 12 percent of the city’s population, according to the 2013 Assessment of Food Security in San Francisco report. But the demand outstrips supply. Nonprofit food programs are at capacity and always vulnerable to funding cuts from the government and private donors.

Funding is also scarce for federally funded programs like CalFresh, which aids low-income California residents, providing some relief so they can buy healthy groceries. But CalFresh was designed to be a supplemental program and not made to sustain an individual. In 2012, the average individual CalFresh benefit was $149.05 per month, or $1.06 per meal, states the 2013 food security report. The San Francisco Department of Public Health had not released its 2018 reportby mid-November.The Public Press reached out to the health department for comment on this new permit process and policy change, but did not receive a response. At present, there is no procedure to implement.

Report: Cities Enable Businesses to Curb the Rights of Homeless Property, business owners use groups’ assessments to police public streets

By Rob Waters // Public Press

trict, was a key backer of a 2010 measure approved by San Francisco voters, Proposition L, that barred people from sitting or lying on public sidewalks during the day.

In 2015 and 2016, the California Downtown Association, a network of improvement districts, mobilized members to oppose a “Right to Rest Act” and other bills in the Legislature that would have protected the rights of homeless people to freely use public space. The Downtown Sacramento Partnership, a 66-block BID in the center of the state capital, employed a lobbyist to defeat the measures.

“This is a great example of the potential influence CDA has under the dome,” a reference to the Capitol building, Emilie Cameron, the partnership’s director of policy and communications, told members of the association in an email obtained by the clinic and reprinted in the report. “We have a unique constituency and potentially a very strong voice that can sway legislators on critical issues.”

Emails to the Union Square district and the California Downtown Association requesting comment were

san francisco public press

Photo by Judith Calson // Public Press

A private security guard rousting a homeless man outside the S.F. Design Center in Potrero Hill.

dents working with the Policy Advocacy Clinic. As part of their research, the students identified 189 improvement districts in the 69 largest cities in California and surveyed them about their activities and budgets. They also used public information requests to gather email records, minutes from meetings and other documents.

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

N

early 200 California cities allow private organizations to manage key aspects of their downtown and commercial districts and to implement policies that restrict the rights of homeless people, according to an August report from the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Many of the groups use assessments levied on business and property owners — and collected by local tax authorities — to hire security patrols to keep homeless people moving and limit their presence on public streets.

The groups, known as business improvement districts, or BIDs, lobby city councils, the state Legislature and other government bodies for policies that limit the rights of the homeless, the report said. BIDs also provide security services, business promotions, street cleanings and events.

The lobbying efforts by BIDs are of questionable legality, the clinic contends, because assessment revenues are being used to push for policies that affect large areas or numbers of people, not just to provide specific benefits to property owners. In 2013, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge dissolved the Arts District BID, ruling that its “economic development services,” like distributing marketing materials and organizing real estate tours, provided no special benefits, according to the law clinic report.

The report, which was commissioned by the Western Regional Advocacy Project, an association of homeless rights groups that includes the Coalition on Homelessness San Francisco, cites numerous examples of this type of policy advocacy. San Francisco’s largest such group, the Union Square Business Improvement Dis-

not answered.

The creation of business improvement districts is enabled by a series of state laws. According to the Berkeley report, most California BIDs were set up after a 1994 law that allowed a majority of property and business owners in a defined area to petition their local government to establish an improvement district. The law authorized county tax authorities to include the assessments that fund the districts on property tax bills paid by business and property owners.

The law school report estimated that together, California districts bring in “hundreds of millions of dollars” in assessments but did not offer a precise figure.

In the 2016-2017 fiscal year, the Union Square BID had assessment revenue of $3.4 million and a budget of $3.8 million.

The report ties the proliferation of business improvement districts to the increasing number of local ordinances controlling or limiting the activities of homeless people. From 1995 to 2014, the report found, 60 BIDs were established in cities across the state and 193 local measures regulating the homeless were enacted.

Many improvement districts hire their own unarmed security forces that typically patrol the district by foot or bicycle and are often referred to as “ambassadors.” While these security operatives do not have power to make arrests, the report cites examples of BID-employed security personnel confiscating the property of homeless people and coordinating closely with police departments to identify “hot spots” and get police to enforce anti-loitering laws.

To Paul Boden, a longtime advocate for homeless people and director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, the BIDs essentially privatize public space and criminalize poverty and homelessness. The improvement districts want to make sure “that every sidewalk, street and park serve to benefit the businesses,” Boden said. “Public space has become nothing more than the hallways of a shopping mall.”

The report was compiled over two years by law stu-