independent
RESCUING THOSE SOLD INTO SLAVERY IN EARLY S.F.
nonprofit
in depth
Author details the story of Cameron House, whose proprietors helped girls and young women escape from lives of prostitution in Chinatown. | 3-5
SEA LEVEL RISE WILL BRING ON DANGERS FROM BELOW Groundwater is expected to be pushed up, causing damage far inland. | 12
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SUMMER 2019 • ISSUE 28
Complaints And Citations Rise Sharply Under Veritas
POWER SWITCH City builds case for pushing out embattled PG&E
At buildings named in lawsuit, record number of violation notices By Noah Arroyo // Public Press
O
wning more than 230 rent-controlled properties in San Francisco, Veritas Investments Inc. markets itself as a premier real estate company that buys and renovates aging apartment buildings, increasing their property value while enhancing the quality of life for thousands of tenants. And Veritas says it has a good track record of caring for those living in its 5,000-plus apartments, pointing to data from the city’s Department of Building Inspection as evidence. “The data establish that Veritas is one of the best and most proactive landlords when it comes to maintenance and care for its buildings,” company spokesman Ron Heckmann said. Renters vs. But an analysis of public records Landlords for a subset of the company’s properties shows they experienced a sharp increase in the number of reported problems and citations after Veritas acquired them. And city inspectors, who vetted those tenant complaints, found more to be valid than under the buildings’ previous owners. Those properties experienced a record high in complaints and notices of building-code violations in 2018 — the year by which the company had acquired them all — compared with any other year
HOUSING CRISIS
VIOLATIONS continued on Page 6
Illustration by Reid Brown // Public Press
As utility goes through bankruptcy, analysis finds benefits outweigh costs, risks of taking over electric supply
MORE INSIDE
By Kevin Stark // Public Press
M
any San Francisco officials are savoring what they see as a once-in-a-life opportunity to take over some or all of the electricity distribution from bankrupt Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to achieve progressives’ long-sought goals of power independence and 100 percent green energy. “I will try to suppress my glee,” former Supervisor Sophie Maxwell said during her April confirmation hearing to join the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. “Power should be publicly held. It should be a public utility. It should not be for profit.” In May, that enthusiasm got a double boost that could prove to be the tipping point in the decades-long, acrimonious marriage between the city and PG&E. The utilities commission released a preliminary report that concluded the long-term benefits of municipal power outweighed the costs and other risks, and
U Photo by Thomas Hawk // Flickr
influence doesn’t mean security. | 10
PG&E continued on Page 8
Photo by Sharon Wickham // Public Press
In April, Evan Meagher was one of several Veritas tenants facing a bedbug infestation — a possible violation of San Francisco’s health code.
MORE ON HOUSING | Joining forces: A land
trust and an Oakland church are trying to protect housing for African Americans. | 7
Despite New State Law, Californians’ Data Privacy Remains Vulnerable By Yuri Nagano // Public Press
LATINOS IN S.F.: Book explains how
that relying on PG&E “has grown increasingly untenable and unnecessarily expensive.” Days later, state fire officials blamed PG&E for the November blaze that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people, adding to billions of dollars in liability for previous disasters that drove the utility into court to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Already convicted of six felonies for the deadly 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline blast, the company could face more criminal charges for last fall’s blaze near Chico, in addition to further lawsuits. But as local regulators push for greater or total electricity independence, some daunting realities confront the dream of a San Francisco free of the nation’s largest electrical utility and some of the highest rates in the land. San Francisco already generates most of its own
nder the California Consumer Privacy Act, which takes effect in 2020, consumers will have the right to opt out of the sale of their personal data to third parties, and request that businesses delete their information. The law calls for noncompliant companies to be prosecuted by the California attorney general’s office and fined up to $7,500 for each violation. But after months of strenuous lobbying by technology companies, which are increasingly clashing with privacy advocates in Sacramento, it appears California consumers may end up having to fend for themselves. That’s because the office of Attorney General
Attorney general is ill-equipped to go after all but the worst offenders Xavier Becerra says it is ill equipped to prosecute data privacy, and predicts it may be able to handle only a handful of the most egregious cases per year. Consumers have for years suffered blatant privacy abuses from companies that claim to be responsive to their requests for anonymity. After seeing their names with birthdays, addresses, phone numbers and speeding tickets displayed online for the world to see, thousands of American consumers have been taking their complaints to
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the Better Business Bureau to try to remove their information from people search sites such as Mylife. com, Spokeo and Whitepages. One irate contributor to the bureau’s forum, Mark Perna, 45, said he called Mylife.com, a Los Angeles-based company that has tallied 9,242 complaints, requesting his information be removed. “If someone wanted to, they could stalk someone,” said Perna, who is a D.J. living in San Diego. After getting no satisfaction, he reported the company to the state attorney general. But he might not get much help from California regulators. Stacey Schesser, supervising deputy attorney general on consumer protection, testified in PRIVACY continued on Page 11
Your Data, Their Dollars
The Fight Over Privacy
2 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2019
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SAN FRANCISCO
FROM THE EDITORS
You Might Have Heard . . .
PUBLIC PRESS
T
his summer, the San Francisco Public Press is adding radio to its repertoire. We have been working for some time to launch a low-power FM radio station in San Francisco — KSFP, which will hit the airwaves at 102.5 FM by July. We’re starting out this venture with a single daily program focused on local public policy. The working title is “City Hall Radio,” featuring one-on-one interviews and roundtable discussions about timely topics. Guests will be DONATE NOW elected officials, city workers, Online: sfpublicpress. policy experts, org/membership Mail: San Francisco neighborhood Public Press, 44 Page activists, creSt., Suite 504, San atives, authors, Francisco, CA 94102 artists and reguCall: 415-495-7377 lar people with important and diverse perspectives. It will also be available on Facebook Live and as a podcast. While “City Hall Radio” is the marquee show, airing weekdays, we plan for KSFP to grow over time into a community radio station broadcasting 12 hours daily. Our effort got a big boost last year with a two-year grant of $150,000 from the James Irvine Foundation for research and development into effective models of local community service broadcasting. The California Endowment has provided our first topic-specific journalism grant: $25,000 for multimedia health
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
Lila LaHood and Michael Stoll
reporting. We have also received support for this project from the San Francisco Foundation, the Reva and David Logan Foundation and the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. We are sharing the frequency with KXSF, a project of San Francisco Community Radio, a nonprofit organization with a loyal listenership and dynamic music and cultural affairs programming. Our two organizations jointly manage a license from the Federal Communications Commission. Expanding into daily content will enable our newsroom to explore a broader range of topics on a regular basis, and will support our ability to develop even more robust investigative reporting projects. “City Hall Radio” will also help us
convene more community conversations about public policy, city government and civic participation. News organizations across the country are finding new audiences and empowering new voices by breaking into audio production and radio. We’re excited to enter this field and open up the possibility of production partnerships with our friends at other local and regional public broadcasters. Our aim across media — print, web and radio — is to offer unique, trustworthy journalism and unfiltered access to diverse voices. If you want to stay up to date on our plans, sign up for our email communications: sfpublicpress.org/newsletter. Michael Stoll, Executive Director Lila LaHood, Publisher
Summer 2019 • Issue 28 (Vol. 10, No. 2) Published May 22, 2019
BOARD OF DIRECTORS Patricia M. Bovan Campbell Kaizar Campwala David Cohn Liz Enochs Neal Gorenflo 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
ASSISTANT EDITOR Noah Arroyo
WOMEN OF THE YEAR
DIRECTOR OF DESIGN
Crossword by Andrea Carla Michaels
ACROSS 1. Big name in stereo speakers 5. Workplace protection org. 9. PC storage medium 14. “The corn is as high ___ elephant’s eye” (Rodgers/ Hammerstein line) 15. Hubbub 16. Type of football 17. “JAG” spin-off 18. Hula hoops, mood rings, etc. 19. Mean-spirited 20. She played Betty Draper on “Mad Men” 23. “High School Musical” director Kenny/Sandinista leader Daniel 24. Borden “spokescow” 27. Japanese sport 29. Carlisle of the Go-Go’s 31. Four-poster, e.g. 34. Powers role in “The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.” 36. Baseball’s highest-paid player, to fans 38. Highest-ranked card 39. Frances ___ (Judy Garland’s real name) 40. She starred in “The Glenn Miller Story” 45. Bit of sunshine 46. ‘60s-’70s space missions 47. Falling flakes 49. Sing like a bird 50. Shows the way 54. 40s pinup, or a hint to 20A, 34A, 40A, 54A 58. Solzhenitsyn’s “The ___ Archipelago”
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61. Ballet move 62. Heady feeling 63. “October Men” author 64. Cobbled together 65. Detective’s find 66. Warhol and Samberg 67. Hollywood Walk of Fame feature 68. Ballpark figs. DOWN 1. “Deliverance” instrument 2. Grouchy Muppet 3. Good Samaritan and then some 4. Follows 5. Freeway exit 6. Whack, a mole, say 7. Pilgrimage to Mecca 8. Lhasa___ (dog) 9. Star whose name means “little goat” 10. French, Ranch or Italian, e.g. 11. Like a prof. emeritus 12. Can. province 13. John Lennon’s former girlfriend Pang/Kind of pole 21. Water for Juan 22. “All You ___ Is Love” 25. Acquire, as a debt 26. Swelling 28. Non-written exams 29. “God ___ America” 30. Troop group 31. Lower California, familiarly 32. Spew forth, like a volcanco 33. Organ transplant need 35. Bitterly cold
Kurt Aguilar
GRAPHIC ARTIST Reid Brown
WRITER
Kevin Stark Yuri Nagano
PHOTOGRAPHERS Thomas Hawk Steve Rhodes Sharon Wickham Garrick Wong
COPY EDITORS Michele Anderson Richard Knee Dean Takehara
CONTRIBUTORS
Saki Bailey (Shareable) Eduardo Contreras (author, “Latinos and the Liberal City”) Julia Flynn Siler (author, “The White Devil’s Daughter”) Grace Mitchell Tada (Bay Nature)
SOLUTION on Page 11
CROSSWORD CONSTRUCTORS Andrea Carla Michaels
37. Caviar or frogs’ legs 41. “Everyone welcome” 42. Dawdle 43. Where some bad ideas look good 44. Former queen of Jordan 48. Move like Jell-O 51. “Frasier” character
52. Buy the next round, e.g. 53. Goes downhill fast 55. Big shade trees 56. Clutter-free 57. Bit of baby talk 58. 3.5, e.g., for a student 59. Large coffee container 60. Tupperware burper
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Photo by Arnold Genthe // Library of Congress
A slave girl is seen in holiday attire in Chinatown around 1900. Over the years, thousands of young women were offered protection at a rescue mission on Sacramento Street.
SAVING WOMEN A OF CHINATOWN FROM SLAVERY
By Julia Flynn Siler
ghost story first led me to the edge of Chinatown. One crisp morning, I dodged the crowds in Union Square and walked past a pair of stone lions up a hill. I had an address — 920 Sacramento Street — and a description. I was looking for a five-story structure built with misshapen red bricks — some salvaged from the earthquake and firestorms that razed much of the city in 1906. Passing a church and a YMCA, I came to an old building with metal grates on its lower windows. Above the main entryway, I peered up at century-old lettering that read: Occidental Board Presbyterian Mission House
On a Plexiglas sign mounted onto the bricks at eye level, I read
More than 100 years ago, Cameron House became a haven for those who were sold or tricked into grim lives of prostitution in the heart of the city
Cameron House Est. 1874
I climbed the steps and pressed an intercom button. A lock clicked. I pushed one of the tall doors open and walked into a dark, wood paneled foyer. I first visited Cameron House in 2013; by then, it was mostly famous for being haunted. A staffer would later tell me he’d once sensed a ghost in its musty basement. There, he said, terrified former slaves — nearly all of them Chinese girls who’d been sold or kidnapped — had hidden in one of its dark corners from their former owners. The girls and young women had lived there under the care of two remarkable immigrant women — Donaldina Cameron, the youngest daughter of a Scottish sheep farmer, and SEX SLAVERY continued on Page 4
Excerpted from “The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown” by Julia Flynn Siler. Copyright © 2019 by Julia Flynn Siler. Excerpted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
4 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2019
Starting in 1874, Women Defied Convention to Help Free Others From Slavery SEX SLAVERY from Page 3
Tien Fuh Wu, a former household slave sold by her father to pay his gambling debts. Cameron served as legal guardian to most of the girls and teens living in the home. They called her Lo Mo, or “Mother.” She, in turn, often referred to them as her daughters. But Cameron’s enemies used a racist epithet to describe her: the White Devil of Chinatown.
F
or decades, Cameron and Wu engaged in what they called “rescue work”— freeing women and girls from sex slavery and other forms of bondage. An unlikely pair, they defied the conventions of their time and even, occasionally, broke laws to help other women gain their freedom. The home they ran at 920 Sacramento Street was one of the pioneering “rescue missions” in the United States, established more than a decade before the world’s first settlement house, Toynbee Hall in London’s East End, and fifteen years before Jane Addams cofounded Hull House to offer aid to Chicago’s immigrants. Starting in 1874, and continuing over the decades, thousands of mostly Chinese girls and women entered the home. Many came from San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ghetto of roughly eight square blocks that was North America’s largest and oldest Chinese settlement. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, many women in Chinatown ended up working as prostitutes, some because they were tricked or sold outright by their families. They were forbidden to come and go as they pleased, and if they refused the wishes of their owners, they faced brutal punishments, even death. From often-dusty records, I learned that the efforts of the home’s founders, Victorian-era churchwomen, with their bustles, corsets and elaborate piles of hair, were driven by compassion toward these enslaved women. They provided food, shelter and the teachings of the Christian faith to members of an embattled immigrant community who faced discrimination and violence in San Francisco and across the West. Displaying grit and ingenuity, the home’s founders overcame considerable resistance to build their rescue home at the edge of Chinatown, which was then considered by many to be the most dangerous section of the city. Those who fled there were taking a leap of faith. The desperate conditions that led thousands of women to take shelter at the home are among the most searing stories from the saga of Chinese immigration to America. A decade after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished the slavery of African Americans, this “other slavery” — the trafficking of young Asian women — was flourishing in San Francisco and throughout the West. And because Chinatown was in the original heart of the city, this brazen trade in human flesh was taking place just a few blocks away from both San Francisco’s financial district and its most exclusive neighborhood, Nob Hill. Today, the barest outlines of these brave women’s stories fill a large bound ledger that still sits in a small, locked archive room on its top floor. In careful handwritten script, the book lists more than eight hundred names of women and girls who took refuge at the Mission Home from its founding in 1874 until January 1909. Nearly a thousand more women’s names from the decades after that are recorded in its case files. Further clues about their lives are buried in immigration records at the National Archives, and a few of its residents, such as Wu, left moving firsthand accounts. The house at 920 Sacramento Street has a haunted history. Few people are aware of it, because human trafficking and sex slavery, until recently, have been largely unexamined corners of the American experience. Yet the story of how the home offered a gateway to so many “daughters of joy,” as prostitutes were sometimes called, is contained within the lined pages of its ledger book and offers tangible proof of the astonishing journeys these women made. They escaped their bondage, they found refuge in an ungainly brick house on Sacramento Street, and they embarked on a fight
for freedom that continues today.
I
t was nearly dusk on December 14, 1933, when a teenage girl walked toward a hairdresser’s shop in Chinatown. Around her, laundry dangled from metal fire escapes, chickens squawked in bamboo cages on the sidewalk, and the scents of dried fish drifted through a neighborhood known as Little Canton. Even in the depths of the Great Depression, San Francisco’s Chinese quarter drew tourists, who came to see its swaying red lanterns and taste its pork dumplings. But for Jeung Gwai Ying, who had arrived in America that summer, it was a place of degradation. For months, the teen had been imprisoned in a second-floor apartment and repeatedly raped. So, as Jeung left the cold street and entered the warm beauty parlor with its acrid scents of perming agents and scorched hair, she hit upon a plan. She did not speak the language of the largely white world that surrounded Chinatown, but she realized that her brief outing to the hairdresser — one of the few instances when she was left to her own devices — gave her the chance she needed to escape. Jeung’s journey to the United States had begun that summer with hope and a ruse. The people who had arranged her trip had promised her a well-paid job in San Francisco. But for more than fifty years, exclusion laws had barred most Chinese from entering the United States, so they had also given her a story about a Chinese American family she was supposedly rejoining in the States. As she crossed the Pacific aboard the SS President Cleveland, Jeung studied the more than one hundred pages of a “coaching book” containing notes on her false family’s history. When she arrived in July 1933, she flung the book into the sea, as instructed, and successfully passed through immigration by reciting the details she’d memorized. She soon realized the job she’d expected was not waiting for her. Instead, she was led to an apartment in Chinatown and ordered to strip naked as bidders examined the swell of her breasts and the curve of her narrow hips. She had high cheekbones and full lips and looked several years younger than her real age of eighteen, making her a valuable prize. But the first set of potential buyers balked at closing a deal to purchase her, perhaps sensing she might cause them trouble. Jeung endured the same humiliating ritual again and then for a third time. The slave trader, Wong See Duck, threatened to brutally punish or kill her if she did not act meekly and comply. If she refused to submit, he warned her that he would take her to “a very dark place.” Reluctantly, Jeung abandoned her defiant stance. If she hadn’t, she feared she would never be able to return home to her family. The price the buyers paid for her was $4,500 — more than ten times what the procurer had given her mother in China as an advance on her supposed earnings. Soon after her sale, Jeung was moved into a second-floor apartment on Jackson Street. Her owners, a pair of women with severely pulled-back hair and penciled brows, set about making Jeung more appealing to men in America. They outfitted her in fashionable clothes and escorted her to the beauty shop down the street, where the hairdresser bobbed her hair, tucking her black locks behind her ears. For Jeung, who was raised as a traditional Chinese girl, having her long hair cut off was the first of many violations. Jeung’s value to her owners lay in her earning potential as a prostitute. With her bobbed hair and alluring clothes, Jeung commanded $25 a night and turned over all but $4 of her nightly earnings to her owners. Twenty-five dollars a night was a high sum in Depression-era America, where the average wage for a female garment maker was just $30 a month. Put another way, Jeung could earn more for her owners in a single evening than most women, hunched over their sewing machines in tenements throughout Chinatown, could make for themselves in weeks. Jeung’s ostensible purpose in visiting the
Cameron House, center foreground, as seen from the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in 1910.
Photo by Arnold Genthe // Library of Congress
“The street of the slave girls” in Chinatown is shown around 1900. Many slave girls from Chinatown ended up in Cameron House on Sacramento Street which was run by Donaldina Cameron and Tien Fuh Wu beginning in 1874. beauty shop that afternoon was to have her hair “marcelled,” a technique named after a French hairdresser in which waves would be pressed into her hair with a hot iron. She had been instructed to get her hair done to prepare herself for a trip later that evening to San Jose, fifty miles south of San Francisco, where she would entertain a group of men at a banquet. Was it the thought of the long evening ahead that made her run? Did she dread the prospect of stepping into her silk gown, only to step out of it hours later, entertaining the first of one or more customers that evening? Five months pregnant, she was certainly aware of the risks to the child growing inside her.
I
t was one of the few times she’d been left alone since arriving in America, and Jeung had just half an hour in the shop before one of the women would return to collect her. The streets had darkened. The minutes passed. She had nowhere to go if she attempted to flee. If she were recaptured, she would likely be beaten as punishment or forced into a drugged passivity from which she might never escape. Slave owners intentionally spread rumors of girls who had run away from their owners to the homes in Chinatown run by missionaries, only to die of eating poisoned food there. She urged the hairdresser to work faster by curling only the ends of her hair, hoping she could slip out of the shop before her
Photo from OpenSFHistory
owners came back for her. If there was a clock ticking on the wall, Jeung must have watched it with rising dread. She was calm enough to put her coat back on before leaving the shop, but she did not take the few extra seconds needed to button it up — perhaps because her swelling belly strained the fabric. She darted south, through the crowded sidewalks of the quarter, her coat flying open. She had one goal in mind: to reach the place of safety that her owners had warned her not to go. She ran a block and a half to a house on Washington Street with an arched brick entryway lit by a Chinese lantern. She climbed the steps and pressed the bell in hope of being let in. She arrived only to discover that she had come to the wrong place. Her fear and frustration were evident. The white woman who answered the door took pity on her and led her through the streets to the place she hoped to find. They hurried toward Nob Hill, where the grand mansions of California’s railroad and mining barons had been replaced by hotels with names like Fairmont and Mark Hopkins. Their size and sheer opulence were almost unimaginable to a girl raised in poverty in Hong Kong. After pushing through shoppers and workers returning home, they climbed the five steps to the bolted door of 920 Sacramento Street, a squat building straddling a steep hill. Jeung caught her breath at the entrance to the house that had served as a door to
Photos above and at right by Sharon Wickham // Public Press
freedom for thousands of enslaved and vulnerable girls and women. To her right, heavy metal bars protected the windows. She didn’t know it at the time, but the windows of the home were barred not to keep the residents of the home inside but to prevent the women’s former owners from smashing through the glass to retrieve their human property. By now, it was nightfall and too late to turn back. Jeung had no other options. She pushed the doorbell once and then again. The doorkeeper peered through the grated window. She saw a young Chinese woman standing outside, her coat unbuttoned despite the cold, and swung open the heavy wood doors to let her in. Two women came into the foyer to meet her. One was a white woman in her sixties with a halo of silver hair, the other a bespectacled younger woman who spoke to Jeung in Cantonese. Listening carefully to the frantic girl’s pleas, the Chinese woman translated her words into English. “Protect me!” she cried. The women were the home’s superintendent, Donaldina Cameron, and her longtime aide, Tien Fuh Wu, who had worked together for four decades to protect some of the city’s most scorned residents. They led Jeung to an adjoining parlor, which had a comforting Chinese carpet on the floor and Cantonese hangings on the walls. The scent of Chinese food drifted through the house. Once they were seated, Wu and Cameron gently urged the teenager: tell us your story.
Cameron House as it looks today. It now serves more than 1,000 low-income and immigrant Asian youths and families with counseling services, domestic violence intervention, food distribution, adult ESL, computer classes, support groups, youth afterschool and summer programs, sports, arts and camping experiences, leadership development and volunteer opportunities.
SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2019 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 5
AN AUTHOR FINDS HER INSPIRATION slavery took great courage: The women were spat upon, threatened, bombs were placed around the rescue home, and they faced nearly continual legal challenges from the slave-owners’ lawyers.
A conversation between Julia Flynn Siler, author of “The White Devil’s Daughters,” and Gabrielle Brooks of Penguin Random House. Q: You have written about many diverse subjects and places around the world. When and how did the idea for “The White Devil”s Daughters” come to you? A: Six years ago, I came across a firstperson account written by a woman named Donaldina Cameron who ran a rescue home on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Chinatown. She described her experience of leading a group of around 60 girls and young women across the burning city in the hours and days after the 1906 earthquake and fires. Dolly’s account, which was a report to her church supporters, was utterly harrowing. I could smell the smoke in the air from Dolly’s vivid descriptions and taste the fear and chaos of the city. That’s something I’m always searching for as a historian — strong, distinct voices and primary materials. I grew up in California and had long been fascinated by San Francisco’s history. After reading her description of living through that disaster, I wondered how I had not known about Cameron. I started digging into her story and realized there was a wealth of primary material not only the home’s own records and those of the Presbyterian Church but also from immigration files at the National Archives. Just as importantly, I soon realized I could track down the stories that Julia Flynn Siler Dolly’s previous biographers had largely ignored — those of the Chinese aides who made her work possible and the stories of the women who passed through the home on their way to freedom. If there’s a common thread between all three of my books, it’s the subject of women and power. My first, “The House of Mondavi,” was a story that began with Mama Rosa, the matriarch, in the kitchen during board meetings and ended with her granddaughter casting a deciding vote in a billion-dollar takeover battle. My second, “Lost Kingdom,” was about a woman, Lili’uokalani, who was unexpectedly thrust into power as queen of the Kingdom of Hawaii and who was overthrown. The third, “The White Devil’s Daughters,” is about trafficked women who find their way to freedom at a home run by other women. All three books explore larger stories of women’s empowerment. Can you tell us a little about your research? It took me more than five years to research and write this history. One challenge I faced was convincing the rescue home to open its private records to me. For more than a century, it had been protecting the confidentiality of the women and girls who took refuge there. But over time, they came to trust me and to believe that I would tell these stories with respect and care. Eventually, they allowed me to review many key case files, including the infamous “Broken Blossoms” case in the 1930s that centered around two residents of the home who courageously testified against a powerful trafficking ring. These files, some of which contained documents dating back to the rescue home’s founding in 1874, offered me an invaluable glimpse not only into the lives of the thousands of people who passed through its doors, but also into the wider history of the city and the state — documenting moments of natural disaster, racist threats and the changing conditions for immigrants and women. I always sat down to review the files at the home in Chinatown itself, walking up the same steps as the teenager in the first scene of the book. In addition to the home’s private files, the grandniece of one of my principal characters, Donaldina (Dolly) Cameron, shared a boxload of family material with me, including 19th-century photos, letters, and Cameron’s Bibles, in which she tucked treasures between its pages. I traveled to archives at Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCLA, as well as the National Archives, to track down the astonishing journeys these women made from slavery to freedom. What were some of the discoveries that most surprised/intrigued you? Although Congress passed the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, the brazen practice of buying and selling women still thrived openly in San Francisco in the chaotic years after the Civil War. Auctions of Asian women took place openly on the docks, in full view of police officers and waterfront crowds. By the 1870s, these sales had moved to less public locations, but the sex trafficking of women continued well into the 20th century — prompting a group of women to organize to found a rescue home in Chinatown. They did this 15 years before the Hull House, the famous settlement home for immigrants in Chicago founded by the “mother of social work,” Jane Addams. They were pioneers in what we now call the anti-trafficking movement. But it’s the story of the women who survived sex slavery that are most surprising. I was especially moved by the story of a Japanese woman who’d been forced into prostitution and escaped to the home. Unlike so many former sex slaves, who did not leave behind records of their experiences that scholars could later study, this woman
What did a typical raid/rescue look like? Staffers at the home would receive a message that a child or young woman was in danger or distress. The superintendent and a colleague, usually a Chinese aide who could translate for her, would go to the apartment or brothel, sometimes accompanied by a police officer or a private guard. The Chinese aide would often make the first approach, asking to be let in. If the doorkeeper refused, the officer or guard accompanying the home’s staffers would try to push their way through, or even break through the door. Finding the distressed child or woman was often challenging, and some owners and brothel-keepers would attempt to hide them or whisk them away. Sometimes, though, women who wanted to leave their situations figured out how to escape to the home on their own, either by slipping away at moments when they were unattended or by convincing someone to help them. When Chinatown was quarantined at the turn of the century in an attempt to contain an outbreak of bubonic plague, the home’s superintendent disguised herself, climbed through a skylight and scrambled over a rooftop to reach a girl who needed help. It’s hard to read this book and not see parallels to today’s headlines —especially to stories of the human trafficking of young women and to the violence that erupts with fear of immigrants. Were those parallels something you had in mind while researching and writing as well? This story of women who reached across racial and class barriers to together fight the enslavement of other women resonates strongly today. What that small group of women did in San Francisco’s Chinatown more than a century ago was an early harbinger of #MeToo — women standing together to help each other. It’s a story of radical empathy and female empowerment. It also became painfully clear to me, particularly after the election in 2016, that the story of a group of women organizing to try to help a vulnerable immigrant population is relevant to what’s happening today. The parallels between the Trump administration’s proposed Muslim immigration ban and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 are especially striking: the 1882 legislation was the first law implemented to exclude a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the U.S. It was one of the most shameful pieces of legislation ever enacted in America and was repealed in 1943.
Photos at top and above by Arnold Genthe // Library of Congress
Top: Ross Alley, also known as “the street of gamblers,” is seen around the turn of the 20th century. The father of Cameron House co-founder Tien Fuh Wu sold her into slavery to pay off a gambling debt. Above: A picnic in Portsmouth Square. became a writer and feminist activist who wrote movingly of her experience. She took what she’d learned at the home in San Francisco and opened a similar refuge for former sex slaves in Japan to which she eventually returned. She was even invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to visit the White House. Her descriptions of the experience of sex slavery are absolutely searing. Can you describe San Francisco in the early 1870s? Aside from the cobbled streets, gas lamps and early cable cars, probably the first thing you’d notice if you were able to timetravel back to 1870s San Francisco was that there were very few women on the streets — particularly in the eight square blocks of Chinatown, the mostly densely packed neighborhood of the city where some 12,000 people lived. Some described Chinatown in those days as a “bachelor society” and census takers from 1870 recorded that for every 10 Chinese men in the city, there was only one Chinese woman. The census takers counted nearly three-quarters of those women as
prostitutes. The steamers from China which unloaded women bound for the city’s brothels or cribs were mobbed by men, and importers of women worked closely with the city’s police force to assure delivery of the human cargo. You write, “For Victorian-era women who did not have the right to vote and possessed almost no political or economic power outside the home, this movement held special appeal.” What was the appeal of this cause? They were a group of mostly middle-class white church women who became outraged by the trafficking of vulnerable girls and young women from Asia and who decided to exert their power in a way that was acceptable during the Victorian era — by creating and running a home of their own as a charitable project, seemingly remaining in the private sphere of the home, which was considered the acceptable place for women to exert their authority at the time. Supported by a few clergymen, journalists and abolitionists, these women claimed the moral high ground in fighting what
they considered a particularly egregious form of slavery in their midst. To wage that fight, they, ironically, ended up entering the public sphere — garnering publicity for their cause, lobbying politicians and regularly appearing in the courts on behalf of other women. It was private citizens, not law enforcement or government, who led this movement. In fact, the corruption in those civic institutions was stunning. How did these women find the courage to go up against the police, the mayor … the list goes on!? These women were motivated by their faith and by their sense of injustice, as well as their desire to save souls. The fight they waged was exhausting and its leaders often felt discouraged. But they had the support of each other and faith in the larger purpose of what they were doing, grounded in their religious beliefs. These women were part of a wave of Christian evangelism known as the Second Great Awakening, as well as a time of feminist agitation for women’s rights. As women crusaded against slavery, many of those same activists began fighting for the right to vote. The fight against
Photos from the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
From left: Donaldina Cameron, in black, with author Carol Green Wilson, Choie Lee and immigration inspector J.R. McGrath; Cameron with young Chinese women on the steps of Cameron House; a portrait of Cameron later in life.
The mission house survived earthquakes, fire and plague. Can you talk about some of the most harrowing incidents? When the San Francisco earthquake struck in the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, the rescue home housed nearly 60 girls, women and babies; that large group traversed the city as it burned in the wake of the earthquake, and eventually they all crossed the bay to safety. For the first week after the disaster, they slept on the floor of a barn, with bedclothes lent to them by a nearby orphanage. For months afterwards, they felt threatened by traffickers and criminal tong members, who saw the chaos afterwards as an opportunity to recover what they considered their human property. It is a credit to the women who ran the home that the entire household was safe despite the fires, which eventually razed all of Chinatown and took thousands of lives. This is very much a history of women helping other women and some amazing relationships that were forged along the way. Are there one or two that stand out for you most? I was moved by the decades-long friendship that developed between two immigrants: Dolly Cameron, the daughter of a Scottish sheep rancher who first arrived at the home in 1895 as a sewing teacher, and Tien Fuh Wu, a Chinese girl whose father sold her to pay gambling debts and who was later abused as a child slave in San Francisco’s Chinatown. At first, Wu strongly disliked Cameron and resented her as a newcomer (Wu had arrived at the home about 15 months before Cameron). They couldn’t have been more different in terms of race, class and opportunities, but eventually Cameron and Wu began working together and became each other’s closest and most trusted friend. Toward the end of my research, I visited their graves to pay my respects. They are buried close to each other in the Cameron family plot, surrounded by dying grass and bare earth. The Occidental Mission Home is still thriving today. Can you tell us a little about its current mission? Now known as Cameron House, the building on Sacramento Street is home to a thriving social services agency for San Francisco’s Chinatown. It runs a food pantry, after-school programs for local kids, and educational and social programs — not to mention an annual community carnival. In San Francisco, the building is probably most famous these days beyond Chinatown for supposedly being haunted. Having explored the dark cellars where girls sometimes hid behind sacks of rice to elude traffickers, I can say it does feel like ghosts still live there.
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SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2019 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | 7
How We Tracked Down the Information to Answer Questions About Tenant Complaints By Noah Arroyo // Public Press
Real estate investors can reduce legal exposure, conceal identities and reap tax benefits by purchasing n our previous reporting on a tenant through limited-liability companies or lawsuit against Veritas Investments limited partnerships. “It is a standard, Inc., most of the allegations and the widespread practice in real estate to company’s defense were rooted in own properties through specific LLCs, anecdotes: they said/they said. We and this practice has been in wanted to see if there was place for quite some time, not verifiable evidence underlyexclusive to Veritas,” company ing those arguments. spokesman Ron Heckmann said Were disturbances from earlier this year. apartment renovations To establish when the earliest widespread, as the plaintiffs Veritas proxies bought the propin 39 buildings alleged? Did renters face noise, dust and erties, we dug into ownership debris? Were other habitabilrecords and found that many of the purchasing entities had a ity concerns like pests, water Renters common mailing address: Verishutoffs and dead elevators vs. common? Landlords tas’ corporate headquarters at Or, as Veritas claimed, was 1 Bush St. in San Francisco. For the company diligent about LLCs and LPs that lacked this attending to living conditions for all tenidentifier, their registration forms — on file at the California Secretary of State ants, not just new renters who moved in website — showed Veritas CEO Yatto renovated, market-rate apartments? Pang Au as a signatory. If so, we might expect to see fewer tenant complaints under the corporate COMPILING TRACK RECORDS landlord than under previous owners, and fewer proven violations of the building code. Using the Department of Building To get some answers, we pored over Inspection’s database, for each Veritas the ownership histories of the buildings property we counted the complaints and transcribed them into our handand violations incurred during the time made data set. We then layered that the company has owned it, as well as information over data from the Departfor an identical time span preceding the company’s purchase date. We ment of Building Inspection to identify then totaled the counts for all buildings. trends. The results revealed that complaints Only then could we answer some and violations both rose after Veritas basic, critical questions: At what rate bought the buildings. had Veritas incurred complaints and Had the types of reported problems building-code violations, and did that changed as well? Not an easy question represent a change? to answer. Surprisingly, the building department DETERMINING PURCHASE DATES does not categorize complaints. So we spent days reading all complaint Our analysis needed to avoid misatdescriptions to determine the main tributing to Veritas any complaints or types of problems and then created violations that previous owners had categories. A single complaint often incurred. That required us to determine contained several types of problems, when Veritas bought each building, such as vermin or mold, and each information the company did not prowas counted. The results showed that vide, despite requests. construction-related complaints — freVeritas buys buildings through proxies — limited-liability companies and limquently involving renovation of vacant units being readied for new tenants — ited partnerships — often named after had increased under Veritas. property addresses, obscuring their inFinally, we vetted our methodology terconnectedness. For example, Veritas with James Sanbonmatsu, a senior city owns the 45-unit building at 698 Bush St. housing inspector. He called it “great, through an entity called 698 Bush C1 LP; and enterprising.” it owns the 86-unit building at 270 Turk St. through 270 Turk LLC, and so on. TOTAL OWNERSHIP UNCLEAR In city records for the 39 buildings, “Veritas” appears in the names of only three previous owners that have A deeper analysis, more fully assesssince sold them to other entities — also ing how tenants are treated, would owned by Veritas but similarly obrequire greater disclosure from Veritas or any landlord about its holdings. scured.
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HOUSING CRISIS
Above photos by Noah Arroyo // Public Press
Top: The name is deceptive — bedbugs can spread into many types of materials and furniture. An effective extermination procedure includes washing and quarantining anything that will fit into plastic bags, which must be set far from an apartment’s infested areas during multiple weeks of sprayings. “This is more trouble than actually moving. We’re literally putting everything into bags,” said Evan Meagher, a tenant at 1260 Broadway who discovered bedbugs in his apartment and is pictured right. “We’re basically living out of suitcases.” Above: The building that Meagher lives in, constructed in 1928, is one of 39 rent-controlled properties implicated in a lawsuit against owner Veritas Investments Inc. Tenants allege neglect and habitability problems, which Veritas denies.
Photo by Sharon Wickham // Public Press
Meagher, a plaintiff against Veritas, began waking to mysterious bites in February. Then his neighbors discovered bedbugs, and he found one in his sink. He and his wife sealed their possessions to protect them from the insects. “You laugh to keep from crying,” Meagher said.
Citations Ballooned at Buildings in Veritas Suit VIOLATIONS from Page 1
since the Department of Building Inspection started its digital tracking system in the mid 1990s. Under Veritas’ ownership, complaints ballooned in response to construction projects that residents said inconvenienced them or seemed unsafe. Other complaints pointed to mold, infestations of bedbugs and rats, broken windows, worn-out mechanical systems and peeling lead-based paint. Veritas is the target of a lawsuit by 106 tenants living in 39 buildings — the focus of this article’s analysis — who allege the company has neglected living conditions and subjected them to noise, debris and stress from renovations on newly vacant units in order to encourage turnover. New tenants can be charged much higher rents under the city’s rent regulations. The suit was filed last October and expanded in December to include more plaintiffs. Veritas has denied what it called the lawsuit’s “unsubstantiated allegations.” Heckmann said the Public Press analysis “is based on false assumptions and a false narrative” that “appears to have been ghost-written by counsel for plaintiffs.” He said an increase in complaints is likely due to activists and attorneys who “encourage the filing of complaints with the City as part of their litigation strategy” to “paper the record,” giving the false appearance that Veritas is neglectful. Heckmann added that some complaints and notices of violation result from attempting to comply with recent citywide ordinances. The Public Press findings represent only a partial image of Veritas’ track record. A fuller picture would require tabulating all complaints and their outcomes, which multiple city departments record in different ways. This stymies efforts to define the full arc of trends — for any landlord. Veritas, which had a reported value of more than $3 billion last year, bought the 39 buildings from February 2011 to
S.F. BUILDING COMPLAINTS RISE — VIOLATIONS DO NOT FOLLOW Annual complaints to the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection have increased, amid fluctuations, since digital tracking began in the early 1990s. But the rate of increase in official building-code violations upon inspection has not kept pace. 15,000 COMPLAINTS VIOLATIONS 10,000
solved violations at the time, “which means most buildings don’t have any.” Veritas says it tracks complaints through a thirdparty service. Complaints and notices of building-code violations are hard to analyze using city records. Department of Building Inspection data do not organize them by categories of problems, said James Sanbonmatsu, a senior housing inspector. So the Public Press read their descriptions in order to tally and sort them into categories.
SHIFTING TROUBLES
5,000
0
1994
’95
’96
’97
’98
’99 2000 ’01
’02
’03
’04
’05
’06
’07
’08
’09
2010
’11
’12
’13
’14
UNDER VERITAS, MORE PROBLEMS REPORTED
Construction
Plumbing, water damage
Heating, ventilation, air conditioning
65
30 13
30 19
Mold
29 8
’16
’17
’18
Category
Pests
BEFORE VERITAS 36
’15
COMPLAINTS
For each of the 39 buildings, we tallied reported problems since Veritas’ purchase and for an equal time preceding the acquisition. By aggregating these data, we found that many types of complaints rose under Veritas.
General maintenance
21
9
15
9
VIOLATIONS
Routine inspection violations (not from complaints)
Other
103 25
51
UNDER VERITAS 90
108 61
8
51 20
53 21
53 29
42
156
22
16
Sources: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder and Department of Building Inspection; California Secretary of State
May 2018. It began growing its empire in earnest a decade ago, when the housing bubble’s rupture dropped real estate prices and the notorious Lembi family — which owned more buildings and was sued by the City Attorney for allegedly mistreating tenants — went bankrupt and sold off much of its holdings to Veritas CEO Yat-Pang Au.
Veritas may have acquired properties earlier than we know, through proxies that escaped our attention. City Hall records the name of the entity purchasing a property, not the parent company behind that entity, or the parent’s parent — meaning that regulators and the public do not know the $3 billion real estate corporation’s full list of properties. And Veritas has not fully disclosed this or been consistent in its claims. When the Public Press first asked the company for its total number of buildings, Heckmann said on Jan. 7 that it “manages over 200 rent-controlled properties within San Francisco.” When asked to be more specific, he said on Jan. 18, “We manage 230 properties.” The number changed again on Feb. 20, when Heckmann said “over 230 buildings.” That correspondence regarded a spring 2019 Public Press report that focused on the lawsuit involving the 39 properties, which we mapped. One of those buildings, 270 Turk St., was missing from a list of addresses on the website for RentSFNow, the Veritas subsidiary that leases its apartments. That list had contained 210 addresses, about 20 fewer than Heckmann had previously declared. On Feb. 25, the Public Press asked Heckmann to confirm that Veritas owned the building, and he did. In early April, a check of the site found that the list of properties had been removed. We asked why, and requested clarity on the total number of buildings the company owned. Heckmann did not answer those questions. Veritas is inconsistent elsewhere about how many properties it owns. On its corporate website, Veritas states that it manages “nearly 200 apartment buildings in the city of San Francisco alone,” whereas on founder Au’s profile page on Angel List he declares that he has a “portfolio of 250 San Francisco apartment buildings.” He describes Veritas as the “largest apartment and ground floor retail owner in San Francisco.” With property owners able to disguise their holdings, the building inspection department struggles to identify the most problematic landlords and enforce the city code. “Those are the games that the landlords play,” Sanbonmatsu said. “It’s hard keeping up with the evasion strategies of the people you’re trying to regulate. “They come up with new ones every day.”
But city records present little evidence that conditions improved in the 39 buildings under Veritas, compared with the record of the most recent building owners. By late March 2019, the corporate landlord’s tenants had filed 392 building complaints, 146 of which inspectors elevated to code violations. That means the complaint rate
56 Graphics by Reid Brown // Public Press
more than doubled under Veritas, and violation notices rose 62 percent. The Public Press asked Veritas repeatedly for its own tally of tenant complaints and notices of building-code violations for the properties, but the company has not provided them. In late February, Heckmann said only that there were 18 unre-
Before Veritas bought the buildings, the most commonly reported problems fell under general maintenance issues, at 20 percent of the total. This included deteriorating paint, cracking floors and walls, broken windows and poorly kept garbage areas. The next-most-common issues related to construction work, as well as plumbing or water damage — both at about 9 percent. While general maintenance was still the most reported problem after Veritas acquired the buildings, construction became a more widespread vexation, at 15 percent. Many people complained of “work being done in dangerous manner,” or said that the owners had not done enough to disclose the nature and scope of the work. “Construction is going on within the building and there does not appear to be any permits,” read an August 2017 complaint from a tenant at 516 Ellis St. “No permit signs are posted and no permits come up on the online permit search.” “Unit above has construction with no prior notice to tenants,” read a September 2015 complaint from a tenant at 1819 Golden Gate Ave. “Part of ceiling almost fell on customer’s son.” Others said that construction areas were not properly sealed, sending dust into the rest of the building. Some people speculated VIOLATIONS continued on Page 7
Tenants have a “basic fear about lodging a complaint, even if it’s anonymous, against your landlord.” — Brad Hirn, housing activist
VIOLATIONS from Page 6
about what was in the dust. “No containment for lead and asbestos disturbance,” read a July 2016 complaint for 655 Stockton St. Inspectors visit buildings in response to complaints and cite the owners for any code violations they discover. While Veritas owned the buildings, only 9 percent of the construction-related complaints led to violation notices upon inspection. By comparison, more than half of the general-maintenance complaints led to notices, as was the case for complaints about mold.
PROACTIVE COMPANY Does that mean the construction complaints were unfounded? Not necessarily. Greentree Property Management, a Veritas subsidiary that operates its buildings and deals with tenant issues, is a client of San Franciscobased Violation Radar, which alerts property managers when the city receives complaints. The service claims on its website that it helps landlords “repair before the inspector arrives.” Violation Radar’s creator, Devon Bradley, said Greentree subscribed to the service in 2017. He called Greentree “the most proactive” at logging into the platform to check on complaints, though he said this was his personal observation rather than a data-driven measurement. He said Violation Radar tracks nearly 1,000 buildings, but would not say how many landowners use his service in San Francisco, the only city where it operates. In other words, it is possible that few of the construction complaints led to notices of violation, referred to in the industry as NOVs, because building managers fixed problems soon after checking Violation Radar, rather than because there was nothing to fix, said Brad Hirn, a commu-
Photo courtesy of Evan Meagher
Meagher shows bites on his arm, which he said were from bedbugs.
nity organizer at the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco who frequently represents tenants in disputes. “The official documented NOVs don’t tell the whole picture,” Hirn said. But he said the official record of complaints itself understates the extent of problems in many buildings, because of “basic fear about lodging a complaint, even if it’s anonymous, against your landlord.”
BUGS AND OTHER VERMIN Complaints about mold also became more frequent after Veritas acquired the buildings, as did complaints about lead hazards and pests like rodents, cockroaches and bedbugs — all of which fall under the purview of not only building inspectors but also the Department of Public Health. Unlike the building inspection department, the health department does not maintain a frequently updated online database of complaints and code violations. An April bedbug infestation at 1260 Broadway, an 18-unit Veritas property cited in the lawsuit, was one example of a problem the department’s lack of transparency obscured from public view. Evan Meagher and two other affected tenants are plaintiffs against the real
estate giant. After telling the building manager about the bedbugs, they also complained to the health department, unwittingly routing the complaint away from the building inspection department’s more visible dataset. The health department responded by sending an inspector, whose final report would be available weeks later, upon request. The infestation affected “not just one unit,” said Veronica Vien, a public information officer at the health department, though she did not provide a count. Heckmann said that Veritas “responded quickly to eradicate the problem in cooperation with the Department of Public Health’s exacting monitoring and requirements.” Meagher had been getting mysterious bites for months. When it became clear that bedbugs were the culprit, his nerves started getting the better of him. “For the first four nights, every time I would feel the slightest thing, I would flip on the lights,” he said. “That happened about four or five times a night. Kind of comedic, in the grand scheme of things, but also not that funny in the moment. A tragic tableau.” Slowly, he acclimated. “I feel like I’m starting to accept my own disgustingness,” he said in late April, about three weeks after his neighbors discovered the spreading infestation. His apartment was about to get its third and final weekly spraying from the pest-control officer. In his living room, stacked halfway to the ceiling, were the bulk of his and his wife’s possessions, wrapped in plastic bags in an effort to keep the bugs out. “My sister-in-law is supposed to visit us this weekend,” he said. “And I’m like, are you cool with being around lepers?” The lawsuit by 106 tenants is Evander, et al. v. Veritas Investments, Inc., et al. See our spring 2019 coverage: https://sfpr.es/ i27-veritas; https://sfpr.es/i27-veritas-qa
Joining Forces to Help Keep African Americans Housed in the Bay Area
Photos by Michael Winter // Public Press
McGee Avenue Baptist Church in Berkeley joined with the Bay Area Community Land Trust to develop a boarded-up apartment building next door through a cooperative ownership structure to maintain affordability and put tenants in charge. By Saki Bailey // Shareable
N
estled among single-family homes in a quiet Berkeley neighborhood sits a boarded-up apartment building whose owner hopes to use it to fight resident displacement, empower African American community members and upend traditional rental housing models. McGee Avenue Baptist Church, which owns the property, joined with the Bay Area Community Land Trust to develop the apartments using an ownership structure built around the idea of keeping the property affordable for the long term and using a management model that puts tenants in charge. The need for alternative approaches is dire. Soaring housing costs and intensifying gentrification have led to massive displacement of historic San Francisco Bay Area communities. African Americans used to make up almost 20 percent of the Berkeley population, but their numbers have declined by 37 percent since 2000, a 2017 report from the Berkeley Mayor’s office found. Three trends have contributed to the rapid increase in housing costs in the area: the Berkeley campus of the University of California steadily increasing its student body, the Silicon Valley economic boom and the unprecedented amount of speculative capital pouring into the San Francisco Bay Area from global real estate investment companies. This has pushed housing prices and ownership opportunities further out of reach for many of the area’s African American families, even those that have been in the area for decades. To help address this crisis, the Bay Area Community Land Trust partnered with the 100-year-old McGee Avenue church, which runs one of the most robust local food programs for the homeless, on a program they called “Empowerment through Cooperative Management.” The program goes beyond housing to generating leadership, sustaining self-management and developing resilience in the face of limited resources. The program’s first project is to rehabilitate the apartment building next door to the church and convert it into housing for underserved and historic Bay Area communities of low and moderate income with three aims: • Provide cooperative housing opportunities to communities under threat of displacement. • Empower African American communities through a cooperative-management model. • Create permanently affordable housing by using the community land trust model to remove land from the speculative market.
The community land trust is an established and successful model for the creation of democratically governed, permanently affordable housing, and most urgently, in the face of the crisis, a tool to prevent the displacement of historic communities. The Bay Area trust, like many of the more than 250 such trusts across the United States, uses cooperative ownership and management in conjunction with the land-trust model. In this approach, the trust owns the land and the co-op collectively owns the buildings, with individuals owning shares, as in a Limited Equity Housing Cooperative. Ownership of a share offers greater security than being a renter: It gives the resident the right to enjoy the use of the property and, most importantly, not be displaced by a landlord taking advantage of rapidly rising rents. In exchange for this security, the resident cannot transfer the unit at market rate and without the permission of the cooperative (usually approval of its board). The Bay Area trust and McGee Avenue church are using community land trusts and co-ops as an anti-displacement tool. They are similar to San Francisco’s Small Sites program that helps preserve buildings with fewer than 25 units, and such laws as the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act that offer residents the first chance to buy their buildings before they’re put on the market. This approach focuses on making housing affordable not only for initial residents but also for future ones by taking housing off the speculative market so that it can be permanently affordable. Historically, affordable housing had an association to “welfare,” which often disempowers its recipients. The Bay Area trust’s program is aimed at removing this stigma and creating a greater sense of dignity and empowerment through selforganization and the security offered by ownership. Just like the first community land trust, New Communities Inc. (1969), which made land permanently affordable for African American farmers and their families, land trusts can serve once again to put collective power back in the hands of African American communities. If you or anyone you know is being displaced from the East Bay and might be interested in becoming a resident in a cooperative or learning more about the Bay Area Community Land Trust, email info@bayareaclt.org. Saki Bailey is an activist, legal scholar and writer on the commons. Shareable is an award-winning nonprofit news, action and connection hub for the sharing transformation.
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“Our costs won’t include the profit component. Our costs for operating and managing the system are lower.”
“It is urgent that San Francisco has a complete divorce from PG&E as quickly as possible and takes over operation of this utility.”
— Barbara Hale, SFPUC official
— Hillary Ronen, District 9 supervisor
Illustration from iStock by Getty images
City Considers Taking Over Electric Grid PG&E from Page 1
electric power but depends on PG&E for grid distribution to households, businesses and even city-owned properties. As the May assessment pointed out, buying the electrical grid could cost several billion dollars for starters and would be a complex, drawn-out process over years, with significant investment costs and risks. (The report did not address natural gas service.) The city’s top utility regulator has described PG&E’s aging infrastructure as “not in a state of good repair,” and upgrading the system could cost many millions. Along with the promise of cheaper, carbon-neutral power, ratepayers would face substantial insurance liability for any accidents or disasters within the municipal coverage area if the city takes over. Then there’s the cost of adding thousands of PG&E employees to the city payroll, along with the financial impact San Francisco’s departure could have on PG&E customers elsewhere in California. Mayor London Breed, who nominated Maxwell, has all but pushed the city’s chips in for a municipal distribution system for the power San Francisco already produces through Hetch Hetchy Power and CleanPowerSF, which together provide 80 percent of the city’s electricity needs. She ordered sweeping studies of what it would take to buy the power grid and how much it would cost after PG&E announced in
Clockwise from top left: SFPUC General Manager Harlan Kelly Jr. warned that the PG&E grid might need extensive fixes; SFPUC official Barbara Hale said the city’s overall costs would probably be lower than PG&E’s; Supervisor Hillary Ronen and SFPUC Commissioner Sophie Maxwell also are in favor of the municipal system. January that it would declare bankruptcy, following historic, deadly wildfires in 2017 and 2018. In April, the Board of Supervisors likewise called for such studies, noting that “the public interest and necessity require changing the electric service provided in San Francisco.” The next step in the SFPUC’s assessment is evaluating the cost of system repair and operations, and calculating potential revenue from taking over PG&E’s distribution and transmission. For his part, City Attorney Dennis Herrera is analyzing the purchasing options and the legal complexities involved. “Does it make financial sense? If it doesn’t, then we won’t do it,” said SFPUC press secretary Will Reisman. Barbara Hale, assistant general manager of the commission, told the Board of Supervisors in January that the city’s overall costs would likely be lower than PG&E’s. “Our costs won’t include the profit component,” she said. “Our costs for operating and managing the system are lower.” Neither PG&E nor the city’s public utilities commission has said exactly how much the grid is worth. PG&E does not report its value to the public, though it will have to make disclosures in bankruptcy court. Besides the commission’s ballpark of “a few billion initially,” Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, has estimated the grid’s value at $3 billion to $5 billion. Other, less extensive scenarios for limited independence involve a partial buyout of the grid
As PG&E Struggles With Bankruptcy
that could cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars annually or at one time, depending on which facilities are purchased. “These types of investments are only feasible if PG&E is willing to work cooperatively with the City,” the May report said. Testifying with Hale to the Board of Supervisors, SFPUC General Manager Harlan Kelly Jr. warned that the distribution system in San Francisco “is not in a state of good repair. We have to realize that if we look at what the value is, we have to discount it based off that.” In filings with the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates private utilities, PG&E warned that carving the company into smaller public utilities is fraught with complexity. Balkanizing its electric system, it warned, would be expensive. The grid was built over a century with little consideration for municipal boundaries. “This overlap of San Francisco’s public and PG&E’s for-profit service is unique,” the SFPUC wrote in its 54-page May report. “No place else in California or nationally is there a patchwork of distribution facilities so intermeshed between a public utility and a private one.”
POWER TO THE PEOPLE Public power utilities are community-owned, locally controlled and operated on a not-for-profit basis. Public power differs from the investor-owned utility sector because it is directly accountable to its customers — residents. Public utilities can be regulated by city councils, independent boards and citizens. INVESTOR-OWNED UTILITIES
RURAL ELECTRIC COOPERATIVES
Business model
Not for profit, community-owned
For profit, shareholder-owned
Not for profit, member-owned
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission jurisdiction
Only for interstate transmission
For wholesale rates
Only for interstate transmission
Regulated by state utility commission
Very limited instances
All
Some
Governed by
Elected/appointed boards – mayors, city council members, citizens
Private boards
Member-elected boards
PUBLIC MAJORITY vs. PRIVATE MAJORITY 2,011 public power utilities provide electricity to 49 million people in 49 states and five U.S. territories. Though most utilities are publicly run, they serve far fewer customers nationwide compared with for-profit, investor-owned generators.
DIVIDING THE ASSETS All of the substations, transformers and other grid assets would need to be divided up, potentially among several public utilities or new private companies. What if key substations or transformers are located outside of San Francisco and shared among multiple cities, counties or companies? “The valuation process, if it actually goes ahead with the transfer of assets on a piecemeal basis, is going to be an incredibly long and difficult process,” said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “We will be doing it with multiple parties, if we break up the utility, and that will be very complicated.” In a high-density city like San Francisco, maintenance costs can be distributed across a large number of ratepayers. That’s not true in rural areas of the state where the risk of wildfire is much higher. Right now, the costs of wildfire protection are distributed among all of PG&E’s customers, but if San Francisco separated, it’s conceivable rates would go up for customers elsewhere. “It may be the case that San Francisco customers would be winners if we break up PG&E into a bunch of municipal utilities,” Borenstein said. “I don’t know who wants to be the utility for Paradise or Chico.” The SFPUC estimated that the city and its residents pay PG&E $300 million a year to deliver electricity. Of that, $75 million is the city’s share of PG&E shareholder profits and borrowing costs. The city also pays the company $60 million annually for statewide “public-purpose programs” such as energy conservation, low-income assistance and research and development, which “are often not tailored to San Francisco-specific building stock or demographic characteristics.” On the receiving end, the company pays $40 million a year in local taxes, fees and philanthropy. “Because PG&E is a direct competitor in serving San Francisco customers, its strategy has been to leverage its ownership of assets to impose unnecessary and expensive requirements on the city,” the report noted. That’s been particularly true since 2015, when the expiration of a 70-year-old interconnection agreement lifted restrictions on whom the city could serve. The report blamed PG&E for delays or excessive costs in 53 projects citywide involving “critical services” such as building affordable housing, and health, safety and accessibility upgrades. “In essence, the City is paying PG&E to build and upgrade its system, and then PG&E charges service fees for the City to use that system,” the report said. In an emailed statement a day after the commission released its interim findings, PG&E spokesman James Noonan said, “We look forward to reviewing the City’s analysis, and appreciate the City’s open and transparent dialogue on the subject. We all agree on the importance of continuing to serve the citizens of San Francisco, clean, affordable, and reliable energy. PG&E has
PUBLIC POWER UTILITIES
PUBLIC POWER UTILITIES
RURAL ELECTRIC COOPERATIVES
INVESTOR-OWNED UTILITIES
POWER MARKETERS (Mostly in Texas)
6%
15%
9%
26%
PERCENTAGE OF AMERICAN ELECTRICAL UTILITIES
68%
60%
PERCENTAGE OF UTILITY CUSTOMERS SERVED
13% 4%
CENTS PER
COST TO RESIDENTIAL CUSTOMERS, BY PROVIDER | KILOWATT HOUR PUBLIC POWER UTILITIES
11.5¢ RURAL ELECTRIC COOPERATIVES
11.6¢ INVESTOR-OWNED UTILITIES
13.2¢ At top: U.S. Air National Guard photo by Senior Airman Crystal Housman; above: Forest Service photo by Tanner Hembree
PG&E has acknowledged that its equipment probably caused the November 2018 Camp Fire, above, which killed 85 people and devastated the town of Paradise. The financial liability from that and other wildfires has saddled the investor-owned utility with billions more in debt. been a part of San Francisco since the company’s founding more than a century ago, and we are committed to working with the City and will remain open to communication on this issue.” The company issued an identical statement weeks before the report was released.
CLEAN ENERGY POLICY A quarter of California’s power is provided by 40 publicly owned utilities, which are organized into rural cooperatives, irrigation districts, city departments — like the SFPUC — and municipal districts. With 3.9 million customers, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is the country’s largest municipal district. Sacramento adopted municipal power in 1946 and is the nation’s sixth-largest community-owned electric utility. The city of Alameda has been generating its own power since 1887, the oldest public electric utility west of the Mississippi River. In February, surrounded by municipal workers and energy advocates, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that his city would not spend the $5 billion originally allocated to rebuild three natural-gas
power plants on its coast. “This is the beginning of the end of natural gas,” he said to a cheering crowd of municipal workers. Los Angeles will phase out the gas plants, which together produced 11.4 percent of its electricity in 2018. Garcetti said the city will replace the generation with renewables, and it’s an example of how a municipal district can move nimbly without the oversight of state regulators. Unlike an investor-owned utility like PG&E, municipal power is not regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission. Voters, supervisors and the mayor would govern a municipal utility. A city-commissioned survey of 435 registered San Francisco voters in March found 68 percent supported municipal power for residents and business. San Francisco District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen said a public utility can be a part of a local version of a “green new deal” to spur economic development and renewable energy generation. During a January Board of Supervisors meeting she said, “When profit motive is the ultimate motive, then public safety comes second. Then reliability comes second. Then keeping costs down comes second.” “If we as a city are able to take over this
responsibility as a municipality, profit motive will not be our ultimate goal,” she said. “Our ultimate goal will be to provide a clean product to our customers in a reliable way that controls costs and provides a public good — like a utility should be run. It is urgent that San Francisco has a complete divorce from PG&E as quickly as possible and takes over operation of this utility.” The city has set an ambitious goal of delivering power free of greenhouse gases, without nuclear generation, by 2030. PG&E’s energy mix is dirtier than what the city produces from Hetch Hetchy and CleanPowerSF, so cutting the cord would make the transition “much less difficult.” Last year, voters approved Proposition A, which creates a bonding authority so the city can develop solar, wind and other renewable generation projects. District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin led a drive for the ballot initiative with the goal of reducing the city’s carbon footprint. All 11 supervisors supported it. Now, the SFPUC may issue revenue bonds to build clean energy generation projects, so long as two-thirds of the Board PG&E continued on Page 9
At top: Photo by Thomas Hawk, Creative Commons via Flickr; above: by MisterOh // Wikimedia Commons
The utility’s troubles stem largely from wildfires in rural parts of its territory, and the San Bruno blast, above, that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes. In 2017, a federal judge convicted PG&E on six felony charges, fined it $3 million and placed it on probation. PG&E from Page 8
of Supervisors approves. City officials might use the bonding authority to pay for the upfront cost of buying PG&E equipment. If the bonding authority covers the upfront costs, ratepayers could pay for it over time. In 2016, the SFPUC launched CleanPowerSF, a not-for-profit program that acquires energy on behalf of its customers. They may choose between a baseline “green” program, which delivers 48 percent of power from renewable sources, or a higher-priced 100 percent renewable mix. By year’s end, most San Francisco customers — more than 360,000 — will be automatically enrolled in CleanPowerSF, though they may opt out and stay with PG&E. For the past 100 years, San Francisco has generated hydroelectric power through its Hetch Hetchy Power System, which today powers 17 percent of the city, along with Muni, San Francisco General Hospital and San Francisco International Airport. These two clean-energy programs deliver most of San Francisco’s electricity needs, but the power still reaches the city over PG&E’s wires. Ronen and Peskin complain that, year after year, PG&E spends millions
on lobbying and other measures to try to block the city’s public-power plans. PG&E has been blamed for several of the most destructive fires in California since 2015. The financial liability from the wildfires has saddled the investor-owned utility with billions more in debt and left it scrambling to contain the political and financial fallout. Recently, the utility overhauled its leadership while pursuing a tumultuous bankruptcy in which it claims $51.7 billion in debts and $71.4 billion in assets. For the first quarter of 2019, the company said its income dropped nearly 70 percent because of the Camp Fire and the resulting bankruptcy filing. PG&E wants regulators to approve spending $2 billion on a “smart” grid and wildfire prevention measures. The plan includes clearing brush and branches from 120 million trees near 81,000 miles of high-voltage power lines, installing 600 high-definition cameras and building 1,300 weather stations to better predict fires. A former federal judge is monitoring PG&E’s efforts to improve safety. In a related move, in late April U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup, who is supervising the company’s felony probation
related to the San Bruno explosion and fire, ordered the utility to not reissue dividends and to direct the shareholder payouts to wildfire prevention. PG&E’s new CEO, William D. Johnson, was set to receive more than $20 million a year (salary, signing bonus, future severance and severance pay from his previous utility). That largesse, on top of other outrage-generating events — $235 million in court-ordered employee bonuses in the wake of the company declared bankruptcy, massive fires caused by PG&E negligence, power outages and explosions — has kept resentment against the regulated private utility burning red-hot among local voters and their representatives. In filings with the state PUC, City Attorney Herrera argued that PG&E was failing to keep people safe and has broken “a variety of federal and state criminal laws.” He listed a series of PG&E mistakes that resulted in fires and explosions in San Francisco. In 2003, a PG&E Mission District substation caught fire, for which PG&E had to pay $6.5 million to settle a complaint for its role. In 2005, an electrical short in a PG&E underground power transformer set
POWER ON A SMALL SCALE The vast majority of public power utilities serve small communities.
1,352
public power utilities have fewer than 4,000 customers
332
public power utilities have 4,000 to 10,000 customers
247
public power utilities have 10,000 to 40,000 customers
Sources: American Public Power Association
off an explosion and sent a manhole cover flying 30 feet in the air. The explosion broke a woman’s arm and she suffered serious burns across her body. The list goes on: A PG&E electrical vault exploded at O’Farrell and Polk streets in 2009, and the fire burned for two hours. That same year, an electrical malfunction elsewhere in the city caused an underground blast. “The commission should recognize that public ownership and local control of utility service has traditionally offered safe and reliable service with greater transparency, accountability, and fiscal and societal responsibility, and all at lower rates than service from investor owned utilities,” Herrera wrote. “The time has come for the commission to support and encourage the replacement of service from PG&E with service from local publicly owned utilities who choose to provide that service.”
45
public power utilities have 40,000 to 100,000 customers
30
public power utilities have more than 100,000 customers
Graphic by Reid Brown // Public Press
Not everyone agrees. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers represents PG&E workers and opposes a PG&E breakup. The union says a city takeover of PG&E would only further complicate California’s energy challenges. Tom Dalzell, a union representative, said the plan is “somewhere between bad and very bad for our members.” He also disputed claims that PG&E neglected the power grid in San Francisco. “Any utility anywhere could always use some improvement, but I don’t think San Francisco has really suffered in terms of the grid,” he said. “I think the SFPUC is negotiating with PG&E, and the city is trying to knock billions of dollars off the system. I think they are taking a negotiating position.” Senior editor Michael Winter contributed to this article.
10 | SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, SUMMER 2019
Book examines progress that activism brought to Bay Area
Latinos Have Gained Political Influence in City, but Not Security “Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco” excerpted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. http://www.upenn.edu/ pennpress/book/15962.html. By Eduardo Contreras
F
ifteen years after the defeat of Proposition R, in June 1994, which set limitations on the conversion of apartments into condominiums, I traveled to San Francisco for the first time. My knowledge of its place in late twentieth-century America was paltry, my sense of its history rudimentary. As a teenager in the late 1980s, I had delighted in sanitized, buoyant images of the city propagated by the television sitcom “Full House.” I had also heard gay people lived there; I do not recall what or who transmitted that information to me. Once in college, a dear friend told me Central Americans had been living in this metropolis for generations and encouraged me to conduct research on the subject. Her revelation piqued my interest, though scholarly investigations were not on my agenda in 1994. The trip would not be a tourist adventure either. I came Author Eduardo to San Francisco to Contreras came be an activist. That to the Bay Area to summer, as Califorbecome an activist. nians clashed over the motives and dangers of Proposition 187 — a statewide initiative that sought to deny public benefits, education, and health services to undocumented immigrants — and as San Francisco’s LGBT community commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, I immersed myself in homeless advocacy work. The organization sponsoring my internship placed me at a Latino homeless project in the Mission, one block east of the 16th and Mission BART station. I could not have imagined that this intersection, the transit system, housing matters, or the city’s Latino population would one day consume much of my professional life.
T
he Latino community I encountered in the mid-1990s had experienced remarkable developments and continuities since the late 1970s. One phenomenon proved palpable as the 1980s began. In 1981, the San Francisco Examiner reported on what many Latinos were witnessing firsthand: a “new wave of Salvadoran immigrants” had reached the city. What became a twelve-year civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992) spurred a large-scale exodus from that country in the twentieth century’s closing decades. Concurrent armed conflict and economic distress prompted Nicaraguans and Guatemalans to migrate as well. San Francisco became a logical destination for those seeking safety and stability given the long-standing presence of Central Americans there. One early study found that approximately 15,000 Central American immigrants entered the city between 1980 and 1985 alone; activists and social service providers often questioned such figures owing to the high rates of unauthorized migration and public authorities’ traditional undercounting of immigrant populations. Newcomers settled in the Mission and adjacent neighborhoods as their predecessors had done in decades past. They relied on existing social and institutional networks for support and interacted in varying degrees with established Latino residents and more recent Mexican immigrants. The latter continued to arrive steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s, though their migration to the metropolis was not marked by the acceleration presented by the Central American case. Mexicans sought to escape economic instability, to obtain better employment than found in California agriculture, or to reconnect with kin. Seen from one perspective, these population flows merely reproduced Latinos’ heterogeneity along lines of national origin. But they diversified the
Right: In July 2014, a 12-year-old-boy told of traveling by himself from Guatemala to reunite with his mother. Far right: A June 2015 protest to prevent Ellis Act eviction in the Mission District. The law allows a landlord who wants to get out of the rental business to evict tenants.
Photos by Steve Rhodes // Creative Commons via Flickr
Photo from Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Balmy Alley in the Mission District is home to murals that detail lives of Latinos in the Bay Area. Artists started the public art project in the 1980s to protest abuses in Central America. local Latino population as well. The latest migrants represented a distinct generation, included a larger pool of undocumented immigrants, and found themselves having to compete for social services in a context of shrinking governmental commitment to the public welfare.
“Hong Kong investors, Asian grocers and bohemian artists” increasingly found the Mission attractive because of its “sunny weather, relatively affordable housing and busy shopping districts.” Many Latinos did not regard their housing options, in the Mission or elsewhere, as inexpensive. One-half of all Latino households citywide paid “unaffordable rent” by 1990: they used more than 30 percent of their earnings to cover lodging. Low incomes, occupational segregation in service and clerical sectors, and high housing expenses placed many in an ongoing state of economic precarity.
L
atino San Franciscans’ quotidian existence in the 1980s and 1990s presented a study in contrasts. In 1990, approximately one-third of them lived in the Mission; the district remained “the heart,” as historian Cary Cordova has put it, of the community. Cultural life during these decades exhibited great effervescence and multilayeredness. Three Kings Day celebrations in January, street fairs, a Mardi Gras–style Carnaval every May since 1979, and an array of cultural productions at the Mission Cultural Center (founded in 1977) offered examples of festive and creative abundance. Leisure and nightlife for queer Latinos flourished as well. By the late 1980s, there were three venues near 16th and Mission, including Esta Noche and La India Bonita, catering to gay Latino men and sometimes frequented by lesbian and transgender Latinas. Most Latinos and other San Franciscans knew about this Mission zone for other reasons: drug dealing, crime, and homelessness. These societal ills were not specific to Latinos or the Mission, but they marked the district as unsavory and dangerous. So did the spike in gang activity; at least seven gangs with hundreds of young Latinos as members existed by 1995. Neighborhood service pro-
Photo from the Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
“Enrique’s Journey,” a mural by Josué Rojas in the Mission District, is based on a book that recounts the travels of a young boy. viders offered numerous explanations for this development, including peer pressure, a lack of social connectedness, poverty, and a desire “to defend [their] territorial autonomy” from outsiders.
E
conomic disparities beset Latinos across the city, and the specter of displacement continued to bedevil those living in the Mission. While Latino rates of labor force participation matched those of white residents, annual per capita incomes did not. Latinos earned roughly
half of what whites made in 1980; the figure was decidedly less than half ten years later. The most economically vulnerable among them (e.g., residents with lower levels of education, recent immigrants) typically resided in the Mission. Notably, rising rents and real estate speculation persisted even as many San Franciscans cast the Mission as economically depressed and undesirable. “Gentrification is definitely here,” one nonprofit worker told El Tecolote in late 1986. Four years later, the San Francisco Chronicle noted how
A
ctivism in response to employment and housing realities appears to have been subdued in the 1980s, though other issues consumed Latinos’ political energies. Commenting on housing pressures in the mid-1980s, one observer noted, “People are not organized to fight back.” Others stressed how American foreign policy, immigration, AIDS, and education pulled Latinos in multiple directions. A considerable number of them, including recent immigrants, mobilized against U.S. intervention in Central America and in support of the thousands fleeing war. Some participated in the Bay Area’s Sanctuary Movement, an organized effort of churches and community groups offering social services to Central American refugees, sheltering them from deportation, and advocating for fair and humane immigration policies. Humanity and death took on LATINOS continued on Page 11
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Economic disparities beset Latinos across the city, and the specter of displacement continued to bedevil those living in the Mission. LATINOS from Page 10
political urgency amid the AIDS crisis. Former members of the Gay Latino Alliance — which disbanded in 1983 — joined other gay Latinos in organizations such as Comunidad Respondiendo a AIDS/ SIDA, founded in 1987, to devise communal responses to the epidemic, push local agencies to offer treatment and prevention services, and educate all Latinos about the disease. Educational reform and Latino representation on municipal bodies responsible for public education became the priorities for others.
PRIVACY from Page 1
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mmigrant rights, AIDS, and educational improvement remained critical concerns in the 1990s, while youth violence, work life, and gentrification garnered mounting attention. Throughout this decade, the Mission witnessed the unfolding of the Community Peace Initiative, a violence prevention effort funded by a private foundation. Missionites from all walks of life, including former gang members, took part in it. The initiative’s team coordinated community forums and peace rallies, conducted street outreach and mobilized young people around a host of interrelated issues (e.g., educational inequities, mass incarceration), and advocated for policies to treat violence as a public health issue. As a new generation of youth became politically engaged, Latino workers did as well, especially those in service-sector jobs. Growing numbers of housekeepers, food service workers, dishwashers, and janitors responded positively to the unionization drives carried out by the locals of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union and the Service Employees International Union. The development confirmed the potential of organizing a new generation of unskilled, immigrant workers and reviving the tradition of class-based solidarity. Mobilizing Missionites against displacement regained prominence as gentrification escalated in the late 1990s. By summer 2000, residents, artists, community groups, and neighborhood business owners came together under the Mission AntiDisplacement Coalition. MAC protested the housing crisis spawned by the dot-com boom and demanded a moratorium on the construction of new market-rate housing, live-work lofts, and digital office space. It proved clearly that direct action and policy advocacy could be channeled yet again to propose human-centered alternatives to the inequities bred by capitalism as the twenty-first century began.
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onths after MAC’s emergence, San Franciscans once again elected their supervisors at the district level. The original experiment with district elections (1977–1980) had been shortlived; the city reverted to at-large elections for twenty years. Electoral results in December 2000, following many run-off contests, shifted the city’s “political power base decisively to the left.” Voters in the seven districts that sent left-leaning representatives to City Hall — including the new District 9 encompassing the Mission and Bernal Heights — celebrated the prospect of a new progressive agenda, one with initiatives “ranging from clamping down on dot-com development to easing up on homeless scofflaws.” It was an exhilarating period to be in the city — as a resident, an activist, or a scholar.
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he early research phases for what would form part of this book began around that time. It was tempting to become absorbed in the activism of the early 2000s, but scholarly priorities directed me to the archives. I had returned to the city to understand what had transpired at least two generations earlier. San Francisco as research site originally drew me because of its motley Latino population. Historical scholarship on the alliances and tensions between Latino subgroups did not exist fifteen years ago, and it still remains rather slim. I also wanted to approach political action from multiple angles. The work on 1930s labor organizing and 1960s social movements fascinated me; yet most historians treating unionization rarely took their analyses beyond the early 1950s, and studies of social movements typically proceeded from the mid-1960s forward. At the same time, examinations of communal deliberations over gender and sexuality tended to emanate from literary and cultural studies fields. I set out to integrate these layers of political life and to historicize their connections and imbrication. Many years into the project, I realized that liberalism and latinidad were the threads holding my analysis together. Liberalism and latinidad, as
Personal Privacy Vulnerable Despite New California Law
Photo by Steve Rhodes // Creative Commons via Flickr
Then-Supervisor David Campos at a July 2014 rally on the steps of City Hall to protest deportation of refugee children.
concurrently welcomed land use controls, temporary moratoriums on large office developments and live-work lofts, and public bodies’ increased efforts to engage them in community planning. Notably, as late as 2008, planning officials continued to express confidence in the city’s ability “to house diverse groups of people and address the citywide need for more affordable housing.”
N Photo by Steve Rhodes // Creative Commons via Flickr
John Avalos campaigning for mayor in 2011 while a member of the Board of Supervisors. He finished second to Ed Lee. I have argued, consistently framed and influenced Latinos’ aspirations and the trajectory of their political engagement.
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now understand that my initial trips to San Francisco took place as its residents confronted the transition and adjustments to a neoliberal order. Gentrification, homelessness, and decreased opportunities for social mobility, as many social scientists have shown, are largely products of neoliberalism. Historians explain that this “new” political ethos is rooted in classical liberalism; it promotes economic deregulation, a retreat from social welfare spending, rollbacks in state protection for workers, and a reverence for the free market. Many San Franciscans living at the turn of the twenty-first century sought to buck this current, and hoped the left-leaning supervisors who took office in 2001 would steer the city back on a progressive course.
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mpressive changes certainly occurred in the new century, often in response to the demands and mobilizations of such groups as MAC and the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition. Between 2001 and 2008, the city initiated a program to offer health care to all uninsured residents, passed laws prohibiting the use of Styrofoam containers and plastic bags at grocery stores, mandated restaurants to display nutritional information on their menus, initiated an instant-runoff voting system, and widened supervisors’ authority over appointments and confirmations to city commissions. These developments reaffirmed a municipal commitment to social welfare, environmental regulation, and democratic reform. Wages and housing, of course, remained utmost priorities. In 2003, voters approved a citywide minimum wage ($8.50 an hour in 2004, $10.74 an hour by 2014) applicable to all employers, tied to inflation, and higher than state and federal levels. The policy came on the heels of an “inclusionary housing ordinance,” enacted in 2002, requiring private developers to offer 15 to 20 percent of new units at below market-rate prices. Residents in the Mission, Potrero Hill, and South of Market
either the housing crisis nor income inequality abated. By the mid-2010s, San Francisco could boast about its advantage in the digital economy, a boom in construction, its exceptionally low unemployment rate, and plans to increase the local minimum wage to $15 an hour effective July 2018. It had also become the nation’s costliest city for renters and one of the most economically unequal places in the country. Politicians, policy experts, and activists have proposed myriad solutions to navigate this reality. Some of these include building higher and relaxing land-use restrictions, halting condominium construction in the Mission and other in-demand neighborhoods, expanding rent control protections, and investing in a future middle class by turning low-wage service jobs into higher-paying jobs. Scholars and commentators, for their part, have pondered one question time and time again: “What’s the matter with San Francisco?” A popular account in an online magazine offered the simplest yet most telling response. “We’ve come so far on social issues, but gone backwards on the financial problems,” noted a Paste writer. Pointing out that much of San Francisco’s early twenty-first-century progressivism is actually neoliberalism, he underscored this observation: “We have progressive cultural values but conservative economic ones.”
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atinos experience the contemporary conundrum of liberalism on a daily basis. While the economic crisis is felt most acutely by those in low-wage service industries, Latinos and other San Franciscans who are administrative assistants, teachers, nonprofit workers, artists, and small business owners increasingly find the city unlivable. Latinos and their allies have engaged in vigorous community mobilization to confront the present situation — as done in the past — and have met backlash against their efforts. Still, they have acquired a fair amount of political clout at the municipal level. In recent history, many Latinos backed and had the ear of socially and economically progressive legislators, including John Avalos and David Campos. Avalos represented the Excelsior and other southern neighborhoods; he ran a promising but unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 2011 and served as supervisor until 2016. Campos became the first gay Latino supervisor elected in the Mission; he served from 2008 to 2016. But political influence has not translated into economic security or guaranteed a future in San Francisco. This book stands as a reminder of past prospects, ambitions, and possibilities — when Latinos and other ordinary residents believed equality, opportunity, and social mobility were within their reach. Eduardo Contreras is associate professor of history at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Left: Protest supporting the president of Honduras, who was ousted in a coup, outside the Honduran consulate in S.F. in 2009. Photo by Steve Rhodes // Creative Commons
a state Senate hearing in April about how limited her office’s enforcement capabilities were. She said that even after the planned expansion of her privacy team to 23 people under the governor’s proposed $4.7 million budget for the department, she would still have the ability to prosecute only three cases a year. That calculation came from reviewing the number of hours spent in the past on similar types of cases. The new staff will have a “multitude of responsibilities” — handling investigations, litigating violations and proposing adjustments to the regulations themselves. Enforcement of the new privacy law can stay effecYour Data, tive only if it responds as Their Dollars technology evolves. The law will cover businesses that fall into any of three categories: those that earn more than half their revenue from the sale of consumThe Fight ers’ personal information; Over Privacy those with more than $25 million in gross revenue; and those selling or sharing personal information of 50,000 or more consumers, households or devices. “The issue here is that there’s 40 million Californians, and the scope of businesses that the CCPA applies to is significantly large,” said Schesser. But there is wide disagreement about the number of firms that will have to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act, to say nothing of more than a dozen other proposals in various states of development in the Legislature. There is no official list of companies, and thus no estimate of the portion of the state’s economy that could be affected when the law takes effect.
RECORDS REQUEST DENIED In response to a Legislative Open Records Act request for lists of companies expected to come under its regulatory scrutiny, the attorney general’s office replied that it had no such records. The office also refused to release any documents or correspondence under a request that would shed light on the office’s strategy toward specific companies, including large tech firms and people search companies. Among other reasons, it said “regulation-related work product is confidential and exempt from disclosure.” Non-governmental estimates of the scope of the regulations suggest that compliance could be a major headache not just for a multitude of California-based companies, but also those in other states, based on the broad wording of the regulation — something industry lobbyists are hard at work to change. A survey by the International Association of Privacy Professionals argued that half a million U.S. companies could be affected by California’s privacy law, The office of based on Census Attorney General Bureau data from Xavier Becerra says 2015. it is ill-equipped California’s to prosecute data privacy law “is efprivacy. fectively a national law,” said Colin O’Malley, principal of consultancy Lucid Privacy Group and co-founder of privacy app Ghostery. “It’s extremely difficult to carve out a market as large as California. Many folks in the digital media space are going to be treating everybody as a Californian.” From an international perspective, it’s clear that California has its work cut out for it. Deputy Attorney General Schesser compared the number of staff she will be overseeing with her Irish counterpart. With a population of 4.8 million — oneeighth of California’s — Ireland maintains a data privacy unit of 140 officers to enforce Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, enacted last year. Schesser said the attorney general’s office is “way understaffed” to handle California’s new law, which she called “groundbreaking” because it is the most ambitious privacy legislation enacted in the United States to date.
‘PRIVATE RIGHT OF ACTION’ The attorney general’s office is in a tough situation because introducing a law “is a totally different skill set” from the investigations or litigation that are the norm, said Travis LeBlanc, partner at Palo Alto-based law firm Cooley LLP and former chief of the Federal Communication Commission’s enforcement bureau. The attorney general’s office is “fundamentally a law enforcement agency,” he said, “not a regulatory agency that is designed around promulgating policy.” To mitigate its inability to pursue many violators of the new law, the attorney general’s office has endorsed a proposal to allow individuals to challenge violators in the courts. To ensure that consumer “opt out” requests do not go ignored, Becerra worked with state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, a Democrat from Santa Barbara who is chair of the Judiciary Committee, to draft a bill to permit a so-called private right of action with regard to data privacy cases. “The attorney general is your basic criminal law enforcement and civil rights officer
in the state,” Jackson said, adding that she was seeking ways other than to “put the entire burden on the attorney general.” The bill, SB561, was voted down in a committee hearing May 16. It would have embraced a key concept in Europe’s privacy law, the ability for consumers to file civil suits. It also would also have removed language allowing businesses to avoid fines as long as they “cure” privacy violations within 30 days of being notified that they are not following the rules.
GIVING CONSUMERS POWER The original intent of the California Consumer Privacy Act was to give consumers “the ability to control how their information is used and whether or not a company can retain that,” Schesser said, so giving consumers the right to take action against companies represents “fundamental fairness.” She said private right of action would “work in parallel” with prosecution by the attorney general. Many nonprofit advocacy groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Sacramento-based Consumer Federation of California, support the idea of expanded rights to civil action. “For a consumer protection law to have real teeth, it should have a private right of action, which allows for consumers to file a class action,” said Richard Holober, executive director of the Consumer Federation of California. “That is a generally much more impactful deterrent against corporate misbehavior than penalties” that would be enforced by the government. But SB561 faced an uphill battle. Many organizations, including industry groups, opposed the bill, and it was so contentious that last summer the private right of action was stripped from the original draft of the main privacy law before the Legislature approved it. SB561 was stopped in its tracks in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Jackson said she was evaluating her options and considering next steps. The business and tech industry was pleased to hear the bill was defeated. “Allowing direct consumer private actions could become a big issue for companies,” said Dan Rosler, vice president for business opportunities at advertising technology firm Flashtalking, based in San Francisco. “Companies could literally be driven into bankruptcy regardless the merits of the cases.”
‘UNFAIR BURDEN ON BUSINESSES’ Jackson has been able to keep the bill alive by offering to sit down and work out the language of the bill with opponents such as the California Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, which represents tech giants including Facebook, Google and Amazon. “This bill would roll back the most critical agreement leading to the CCPA — that this complex, new law would be enforced by a regulator,” Sarah Boot, policy advocate for the California Chamber of Commerce, said at the April hearing. “SB561 would allow thousands of trial attorneys to test a business’ ability to perfectly comply with the complexities of this new law.” Boot called the bill a “significant and unfair burden on businesses.” Other senators have been skeptical of the bill. Sen. Andreas Borgeas, Republican from Fresno, called it “red meat for trial lawyers” and said that “a ravenous frenzy” of privacy cases brought forth by consumers would have a chilling effect on business. Sen. Bob Wieckowski, Democrat from Fremont, represents a district that is home to major Bay Area tech companies, including electric automobile maker Tesla. Wieckowski said he was “not comfortable” supporting the bill, although he generally supported a private right of action. “There are a lot of people who don’t want to let people be able to access their own lawyers,” to address privacy violations, Jackson said. She said she would work with all sides to create an enforcement mechanism that is effective for the “94 percent of Californians who want their privacy rights protected.” Meanwhile other lawmakers, including state Sen. Thomas J. Umberg, Democrat from Santa Ana, have proposed that district attorneys and city attorneys in large cities support the state in enforcing the new privacy law. Both the attorney general’s office and Jackson said they were looking into such possibilities. Reporting was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
CROSSWORD PUZZLE SOLUTION FROM PAGE 2
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SEA BENEATH US
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This story first appeared in Bay Nature magazine. For the full-length story, visit baynature.org/ article/the-sea-beneath-us By Grace Mitchell Tada // Bay Nature
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hen we think of the water table, we probably imagine a hard line that runs parallel to the Earth’s surface some distance below us and, beneath that line, a big blob-like lake that we call groundwater. But it’s not really lake-like. Groundwater exists within permeable layers of rock, called aquifers, classified as either confined or unconfined. Water fills the space between rock particles. Confined aquifers are usually tucked deep in the earth, pressurized between less permeable layers of rock. Unconfined aquifers, like the one Hill described beneath Oakland, commonly exist in coastal areas and at river mouths. These aquifers often sit close to the surface, and they swell when for instance, it rains. Only recently have scientists come to understand how sea level rise can affect coastal groundwater. The seminal research on the phenomenon was conducted in Hawaii. In 2012, Kolja Rotzoll, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, noticed that inland well water levels fluctuated with the occurrence of large offshore waves. If, for instance, a storm in the Pacific caused large swells that lasted for several days, well water up to three miles inland would also rise. High tides also affected water levels inland, Rotzoll said. Hearing about the observation, a colleague of Rotzoll’s, marine geologist Chip Fletcher,
Sea level rise has a gotcha-from-behind twin: rising groundwater. It’s already here. And some experts say we’re not ready for it.
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he USGS has liquefaction-susceptibility maps for the Bay Area, but these don’t account for sea level rise. Municipalities needed to incorporate the risk posed by rising water tables into their climate adaptation plans, Hill realized. But she knew she’d need data to convince anyone that the problem was real. Detailed information about water tables around the bay at that point was lacking. That’s partly because the complex geology around the bay complicates mapping efforts, and partly because municipalities tend to map groundwater only when they plan to draw from it, which the cities around the bay generally don’t do (with some exceptions). In 2017 Hill and graduate student Ellen Plane analyzed data from the state water board that contained water-level measurements from water wells around the bay. The wells, originally installed to monitor groundwater pollution, allowed mapping of water table levels near the shore. The results, released in 2018, were unsettling. The water table was already high in many areas meaning that as the sea rose, large patches of land would eventually, if they hadn’t already, be subject to rising groundwater. Hill and Plane’s maps provided information, not predictions, yet they suggested that anything between the assumed 1 to 3.2 feet of sea level rise by 2100 would not be pretty, especially when combined with projected subsidence. As sea levels gradually rise in the decades to come, water might push up through storm drains or directly through the ground, damaging infrastructure and building foundations. Freeways and airports near the sea (and there are many, SFO and Oakland International Airport included) would likely become soggy messes. Inundation at wastewater treatment facilities, often situated on low-lying land, could trigger leaks of untreated water. Rising salt water might corrode urban drainage systems, which would stop functioning properly as their pipes filled permanently with groundwater. Brackish pools of water could become regular features of the urban environment. More worrisome, rising groundwater might carry toward the surface hazardous material trapped in the soil. This happened in Honolulu about 10 years ago after two months of rain. A slick of diesel fuel, gasoline and oil (spillage from the city’s military history) sits above the water table, so when the water table rose, it pushed the pollutants upward. Fumes of gasoline wafted from the ground. Grass and trees died. “There was a real fear of spontaneous combustion,” Fletcher said. The slick itself didn’t surface that time, but next time it might. And around the rim of the bay, once a
independent
nonprofit
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center of heavy industry, we could see worse: arsenic, lead, benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PCBs, even possibly radioactive waste.
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ast Oakland is already among the top 5 percent of polluted California ZIP codes. The mostly lowincome, primarily nonwhite residents who live there have relatively high rates of chronic disease. Life expectancy for African Americans in the Oakland “flats” can be up to 14 years less than in the hills. And now these already beleaguered communities face the prospect of contaminants welling up from beneath their feet. Not everyone agrees with Hill’s assessment of East Oakland. Representatives from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the San Francisco Regional Water Board say they have a robust pollutionmonitoring system in place. “Adaptive management is something that we’ve embraced,” said Tina Low of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. “If our remedies are no longer protective, we can go back and do something else.” Hill countered that they don’t monitor often enough to catch an issue that can show up suddenly — in the space of a single king tide, for example. Bay Area planners eagerly await USGS models in development that will allow them to predict, with greater accuracy than Hill and Plane’s maps, how the coastal water table will respond to sea level rise. The models, which use Hill and Plane’s data set for validation, are slated for public release later this year. With them in hand, “We’ll incorporate that understanding into our broader adaptation planning,” said Alex Westhoff, a planner at the Marin County Community Development Agency. But even with these models available, next steps aren’t necessarily clear because the problem is so new. Replacing and shoring up infrastructure and implementing other adaptation strategies will be expensive, so the biggest hurdle may be funding. “It’s a multibillion-dollar area, and we struggle in the millions to try to do shoreline restoration,” said Paul Detjens of the Contra Costa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District. “We’re talking a whole ’nother order of magnitude.” Grace Mitchell Tada studies landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley. She frequently writes about the built environment and is co-editing the forthcoming volume “Black Landscapes Matter.” Bay Nature is a quarterly magazine that explores and celebrates the beauty of the natural world in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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recognized if tides and wave energy affected coastal water tables, then as seas rose, the water table would rise inland as well. Rotzoll and Fletcher wrote up their findings, which were published in the journal Nature Climate Change that same year. The relationship between sea and groundwater levels they described applied to most low-lying coastal areas, not just Hawaii, and scientists across the country, from Florida to New Hampshire to California, took note. The study implied that many coastal areas were threatened by flooding that planners hadn’t even considered. Patrick Barnard, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in California, describes the paper as a wake-up call. “We may be missing a huge component of coastal vulnerability to climate change,” he remembers thinking. Hill soon caught wind of Rotzoll and Fletcher’s work and mentally translated it to the Bay Area context. Around the bay, most development has occurred on wetlands filled with sand, mud and building rubble from 19th-century construction efforts, as well as alluvium, the material that washes down from surrounding watersheds. Fill and alluvium make up coasts in Hawaii too, but the islands’ coastal plains also sit atop stabilizing fossil reefs and dunes. “I thought, ‘Huh, well, our geology is really different from Hawaii’s,’” Hill said. “But actually, we’re different in a bad way.”
That’s largely because Bay Area residents must also consider earthquakes, which can exacerbate the problems posed by rising groundwater. This lesson was driven home in Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2011, the city of just under 400,000 people experienced aftershocks from a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that unleashed horrific damage. One-hundred and eightyfive people died, 80 percent of the city’s underground infrastructure was obliterated, and thousands of buildings were leveled. Why? The city was built on a sand-and-gravel plain with a high water table. When the earthquake struck, the soil acted like a liquid, partly swallowing vehicles and cracking and tilting buildings. It is a problem shared by and well-known in the Bay Area.
44 page st., suite 504 • san francisco, ca 94102
n East Oakland, on a residential street in front of a small park, Kristina Hill stopped and got out of her vehicle. She walked to the center of the street as a gaggle of graduate students emerged from their cars and gathered around her. It was midday, early September, the bright, hot sun directly overhead. Hill, a professor of urban and environmental design at UC Berkeley, had chosen the spot because when it rains heavily, water gushes up from storm drains here, forming filthy brown ponds. “That will happen more and more,” Hill said. Then she proceeded to describe a peculiar, almost apocalyptic future. Water will leach inside homes, she said, through basement cracks. Toilets may become chronically backed up. Raw sewage may seep through manholes. Brackish water will corrode sewer and water pipes and inundate building foundations. And most hazardous of all, water percolating upward may flow through contaminants buried in the soil, spreading them underground and eventually releasing them into people’s homes. The coup de grace will be the earthquakes, which, when they strike, may liquefy the entire toxic mess, pushing it toward the surface. The future Hill described is caused by a phenomenon called groundwater rise. In a nutshell, as a warming climate raises sea levels, the sea won’t only move inland, flooding low-lying land near the shore; it may also push water up from beneath our feet. That’s because for those of us living near the shore, a sea lurks in the ground — a saltwater water table. On top of that salt water floats a layer of lighter fresh water. As the salt water rises with rising seas, Hill and others think, it will push the fresh water upward. In lowlying areas, that water may emerge from the ground. The result, Hill said, will be that in places like Oakland, flooding will occur not just at the shoreline, but inland in areas once considered safe from sea level rise, including the Oakland Coliseum and Jones Avenue, where Hill and her students now stood, more than a mile from San Leandro Bay. In fact, she added, rising groundwater menaces nearly the entire band of low-lying land around San Francisco Bay, as well as other coastal parts of the United States. The threat it poses can’t be neutralized with the usual strategy: physical structures that keep the sea at bay. No matter how many seawalls we build, many experts say, groundwater can still gurgle up from below, potentially turning large swaths of the densely populated shoreline around the bay into unwanted, unplanned, possibly toxic wetlands. The issue is barely on the radar of Bay Area planners and decisionmakers; it’s been mostly overlooked until recently. The public has hardly heard of it. Hill is trying to change all that. She’s on a mission to increase awareness of sea level rise’s gotcha-from-behind twin — groundwater rise.
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Photo by Martin Luff // Wikimedia Commons
Liquefaction forced water to the surface in a 2011 earthquake in New Zealand. With seas rising, the same phenomenon could push a toxic mess above ground in the Bay Area.