A few of the newly arrived mid-Market workers were a bit geographically challenged – they kept talking about how they worked in the Tenderloin, which is actually on the other side of Market – but no big deal. Some were a bit defensive, but with tech under siege in this town, that’s understandable.
What was powerful was hearing Close talk about the often-hidden side of the mid-Market “renewal:” The population that was already there.
“This area is an elder ghetto,” she said, and a lot of the low-income seniors feel threatened. “It’s what Huey Newton told me in 1965,” she explained. “He said it’s not that we’re exploited, it that we’re expendable.”
Harrison Chastaing, the longtime KPOO reporter who lives in the area, noted that “Twitter never did anything to say ‘we’ve moved to the neighborhood,’ nothing to welcome the residents.”
I got into a bit of an argument around whether the tax break was really needed (Zendesk and Twitter are doing fine, and could pay their taxes like everyone else), but everyone seemed open to one of the ideas I floated: A code of ethics, of sorts, for well-paid new arrivals to San Francisco, in tech and any other industry, that starts with never buying or moving into a building that’s had an Ellis Act eviction. Hey, even Ron Conway wants to amend the Ellis Act.
Oh, and Google is going to pay for free Muni for kids. About $3.5 million a year. Good step – although it’s a fraction of what the company would owe in traffic fines if the city didn’t let the Google buses park in Muni stops for free.
Does anybody out there still think the bus protests didn’t work? Without them, and all the attention they’ve attracted, do you really think our great benign overlords at Google would see any reason to donate money to Muni?
If I have one thing to say to new young arrivals to this city who have a lot more money than any previous generation of new young arrivals ever did, it’s this: You are moving into a community that existed before you were here, and there are vulnerable people and fragile cultures that your arrival can impact. It’s fine to build disruptive technology; it’s not fine to disrupt communities. Think about that; pay attention to it. And check out what Spike Lee has to say on the subject:
Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!
Nah. You can’t do that. You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say, like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans. Or what they do in Brazil, what they did to the indigenous people. You have to come with respect. There’s a code. There’s people.
I think that’s pretty clear.
Jeff Adachi, the SF public defender, was on Forum this morning talking about the latest SFPD scandal, and he raised the same question that’s been bothering me since this first broke: How is it possible that nobody knew this was going on?
I mean, there’s always been some low-level corruption in every major urban police force, and there are always a few cops who are too rough, or who take drugs from a suspect and then go sell them. But the idea that, for years, Southern Station officers used pass keys to enter residential hotel rooms without permission or a warrant – and yes, that was business as usual – and nobody in any position of supervision or management knew anything about it? A bit hard to accept.
Jim Hammer, a former police commissioner and prosecutor, insisted that “the system worked.” If that’s the case, Adachi wondered, how did this all happen?
“There is a lot of perjury that happens every day in court,” he said. “Judges tend to believe police officers. And if they get caught lying, the case gets thrown out, and that’s it.” When’s the last time a police officer was charged with perjury for testifying falsely in a narcotics case?
The feds seem to be done with this, and I think Chief Greg Suhr (who wasn’t in charge when this all went down) is legitimately outraged. Maybe he’ll conduct his own internal investigation, and see if this was really limited to a few rogue cops who never let anyone else know what they were doing.
