He cited Cohen’s support for the Twitter tax break and the demolition of rent-controlled housing at ParkMerced, and her support of the 8 Washington development project on the waterfront. “She’s been on the wrong side,” he said.
Although D 10 has the highest percentage of homeowners of any district in the city, the vote will still be a test of whether residents are satisfied with what Mayor Ed Lee (who will be almost certain to endorse Cohen) is doing to prevent massive displacement in the city. And it will bring into focus the ambitious plans for massive development that state and regional planners have in mind for the Southeast part of the city.
No elected officials were on hand; just a diverse group of D10 residents. But Kelly has lots of progressive support, so this could be a close, hard-fought battle.
Chron reporter Heather Knight was there, and she asked me a very good question: Why in 2014, when things are every bit as bad as they were in the first dot-com boom, are there so few challengers to incumbent supervisors – when in 2000, pretty almost every incumbent or candidate backed by the mayor lost.
I told her that was the first year of district elections – and that the anger at Mayor Willie Brown was deep and visceral. This time around, the incumbents (and Mayor Ed Lee) are at least talking a little about housing issues and affordability – and the anger seems to be more directed at Google and Twitter than at the elected officials who brought this crisis about. And challengers are starting to emerge.
But if incumbents on the ballot vote against the key tenant bills that will be coming up this spring, and if the mayor vetoes any pro-tenant legislation, the situation will change. Very quickly.
I suppose I get that the San Francisco Chronicle couldn’t be bothered with the regional tenant conventions, or with the huge citywide convention, although it seems like pretty big news that tenants are organizing on a level we haven’t seen in a long, long time. But when more than 500 people from around the state make it all the way to Sacramento for an upbeat rally … you’d think it would merit at least a story. But: Nothing. It’s as if the tenant movement doesn’t exist in the pages of the city’s dominant daily paper.
Assemblymember Tom Ammiano’s complaints about the way the Lee Administration is dealing with Healthy San Francisco point up a flaw that nobody likes to talk about in the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
Since the Republicans have spent most of their waking hours in the past 12 months attacking the program, Democrats have been reluctant to complain about it – but let’s face it, Obamacare was written with the direct input of the insurance companies, who got a lot more out of it than consumer advocates. Which is why the “Affordable” Care Act isn’t always affordable.
The city has taken the position that adult citizens who are eligible for ACA shouldn’t be accepted into Healthy San Francisco. Colleen Chawla, spokesperson for the Department of Public Health, told me that “anyone eligible for publicly subsidized health insurance is not eligible for HSF.”
But that misses the point, Ammiano told me. “Health San Francisco is not an insurance program,” he said. “It’s part of the safety net. And there are a lot of people who can’t afford Obamacare.”
The Health Commission is now going to delay any changes until the end of 2014, but at that point, the city still intends to kick off the program anyone who could possible get ACA insurance, even if it’s too expensive – and thus will leave some significant number of people uninsured entirely.
“Healthy San Francisco was supposed to work with Obamacare,” Ammiano said. “The mayor’s approach is all wrong.”
The new move by Google to take over a building in the Northeast Mission is a bit alarming, particularly since I don’t think that area is even zoned for office space. It’s not just the basic land-use question: If tech companies (which will claim they aren’t really offices, or that there really were offices there before) start moving in to what is now production, distribution, and repair space, a lot of existing small businesses and the jobs they offer will vanish.
This came up as a huge issue in the last dot-com boom, when, among other things, a developer tossed a few hundred artists out of low-cost studio space in the Mission for a highrise tech office building (which never got built). How about instead Google build some office space in Mountainview, near the Caltrain line?
Oh, and for all of those tech-supporters who complain that old-fashioned industry needs a new business model, I offer you this, from David Lowery, frontman for Camper Van Beethoven (and a bit of a critic of Google …)
Lowery announced today that Camper Van Beethoven’s 2013 net profit was $645 million higher than Twitter’s. That’s right: The estimable band actually makes money. Twitter doesn’t. “Maybe,” he noted, “Camper Van Beethoven needs to update our business model to include tax breaks and political cronyism.”
