Donald Trump becomes president Monday/20 at 9am local time, and some of my neighbors in Bernal Heights are encouraging people to meet up on the hill for a “primal scream.” I totally get it.
But if you want to organize and fight back, local author and activist Rebecca Solnit is hosting a livestream program featuring Charlie Jane Anders, Anand Giridharadas, Bill McKibben, Liz Ogbu, and Akaya Windwood “to celebrate community and cultivate a pathway for hope in these dark times.” It’s called “The Way We Get Through This is Together,” and it also starts at 9am. You can see it here.
At the People’s March Saturday, focusing on immigrant rights, the energy was palpable. Several thousand packed the corner of 24th and Bryant and marched through the Mission. City Attorney David Chiu talked about how San Francisco was, and will remain, a sanctuary city. Sup. Jackie Fielder’s first resolution confirmed that, unanimously. Mayor Daniel Lurie has made it clear that city officials, including the cops, will not participate in or in any way coordinate with ICE raids.
Since Trump has said that mass deportations will be the first order of business (after he pardons the Jan. 6 rioters), San Francisco will need to be ready.
But the second order of business in the White House and Congress may be cutting federal funding for sanctuary cities, making the city’s looming budget crisis even worse. I don’t see how Lurie and the supes can cut their way out of this, particularly when services that the federal government has provided in the past may go away, leaving even more burden on local and state governments.
Fielder’s ceremonial swearing in Friday was packed, the auditorium in Mission High pretty close to standing room only. Former Assemblymember Tom Ammiano administered a very different oath than the supes take in their formal appearance; Fielder swore to protect and defend the most vulnerable in the community, and to bear good faith and allegiance to the organizers that came before her.
Ammiano was in his element. He talked about his hope for Sup. Fielder, and the need to expand Healthy San Francisco, his landmark legislation, to include dental care. He talked about the need to repeal Prop. 13. He talked about his days teaching in the Mission when that initiative eliminated funding for so many needs in the public schools. “This right wing guy told me we are cutting your funding, but we want to see God back in the schools,” Ammiano said. “I told him I used to have 20 students, now I have 30, and if God can find any room in my class, she’s more than welcome.”
Lurie showed up, as he has to the previous supe events, which alone is a dramatic change: London Breed didn’t reach out to people who she opposed, and I can pretty much guarantee that she would not have joined Fielder on stage.
Lurie introduced and thanked all the supes and former supes in the room, and the audience applauded nicely. Then he mentioned Dean Preston, and the room erupted, ongoing cheers, standing ovation—other than Fielder, Preston was the most popular person in the auditorium.
Lurie said he was going to work with all 11 supes—although his first big move is to try to take away their authority to approve contacts.
Preston has been talking for some time now about the problem of corporate, conservative news media, which in San Francisco have their own echo chamber. The local media have created, allowed, and expanded false narratives about crime, about progressives opposing housing, about homelessness and so much more.
So at a party celebrating his five years in office, he mentioned that he wants to work on addressing that media narrative, and that his next big project will involve media. The Chron picked up on this instantly, and the story by Aldo Toledo was perfectly fair, and I don’t blame Toldeo because reporters don’t write headlines, but think about this:
Preston, now out of office, wants to launch a progressive media outlet to push his politics
First: He hasn’t said he’s going to launch a news “outlet.” Second, as Preston told me, if, say, Sup. Matt Dorsey wanted to start a media outlet, the headline would talk about fighting crime. If the Yimbys launched a newspaper, the Chron would talk about promoting housing development.
When it’s a progressive like Preston, it’s all about “his politics.”
Preston talked in his 48hills exit interview about why the billionaires were so determined to get rid of him:
I’m not friends with these billionaires. I know people who [are]. And what they’ve all reported to me is that the original sin, the thing that they hold against me more than anything else and has motivated their massive giving against me, has been Prop I. Doubling the tax in San Francisco whenever one of these real estate tycoons or conservative billionaires sells an office building, sells a mega mansion in Pacific Heights, brings in, the low end around $100 million a year. The high end is about $180, $190 million a year.
And we didn’t ask their permission. We didn’t negotiate the number down with them, we just did it. They outspent us over five to one, and we won. So, they’re very motivated by the bigger money interests. Billionaires, big corporate interests. They want to deregulate, to not pay as many taxes and to maximize profits.
There’s another element to this, too, I think, and it explains a lot about local and national politics. The last thing very rich people want is a clear public demonstration that taxing their fortunes to make the rest of our lives better actually works. If taxing the rich to build social housing gets people off the streets, maybe every city will want to do it. Maybe the message will get out the economic inequality is the root cause of most of our social problems, and that it’s relatively easy to fix.
That’s terrifying to the billionaire class. That why they can’t let progressives win on economic issues.
I saw a picture on social media the other day of a beautiful, shiny, car from the early 1960s, the kind you see in the Mission now and then, sometimes with a custom suspension built as part of lowrider culture.
The caption said it all: “Fifty years from now, nobody is going to ‘lovingly restore’ a Tesla.”
I think that’s safe to say.
I thought about that when I saw the latest move by developers to demolish a little single-family cottage on Sanchez St. and replace it with a much bigger, five-unit building. It comes up at the Planning Commission Thursday/23.
The existing building isn’t a great historic treasure, but it dates back to 1900, and is the kind of place that someone might fix up and restore.
It looks like this:
We’re going to get this:
125 years from now, nobody is going to “lovingly restore” that new building.
In fact, 125 years from now (if it lasts that long) nobody will look at it and say: Wow, that’s worth walking the neighborhood to see. Wow, that’s a great example of really cool 21st Century architecture.
Not blaming the architect: Today, design is all about maximizing every single square inch of building envelope space to squeeze every possible dollar out of a residential structure. There will never be a gabled roof or a turret tower (nice touches of Victorian architecture) in a modern San Francisco building; it’s a waste of space.
The existing building is vacant. It’s got one legal unit and one unauthorized unit; the city gets a net gain of three units, all of them market-rate. This is the future Sen. Scott Wiener and the Yimbys want. I know: Cities have to change, and can’t be “frozen in time,” and some believe that more housing will eventually bring down prices (although there’s no evidence that it will).
Still, people come from all over the world to walk through the cool neighborhoods of San Francisco. They aren’t going to come to look at this.
Meanwhile, the commission is voting to continue discussion of a bill I hadn’t even noticed: Sup. Joel Engardio wants to allow condo conversions of Accessory Dwelling Units. That means you can build an ADU on your property, and instead of letting an aging relative live there, or renting it out (which are the arguments for more ADUs as affordable housing), you sell it at whatever the market will pay. Maybe you evict the existing tenant and sell it as a condo.
This will, of course, create an incentive for more ADUs—but won’t create any affordable housing, and could very well eliminate existing affordable housing.
That’s supposed to come up at the Thursday/13 meeting.
