San Francisco Bay Guardian - Essential Bay Area News, Politics, Arts, and Culture

Sheriff's wife talks to KGO-TV

tim — Sun, 27 May 2012 22:05:49 +0000

KGO's Dan Noyes flew to Caracas, Venezuela to interview the wife of embattled San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, and while her comments haven't made anywhere near the media splash that most scraps of information on this sordid tale create, it's very much worth watching the video. Check it out here.

Remember as you watch: Mirkarimi hasn't been able to speak to his wife in months. The stay-away order prevents him from seeing her or phoning her or emailing her or contacting her in any way (except to coordinate his limited visits and skype calls with his son). It's possible that the two of them came up with a joint story early on in the process, before the restraining order, but unless that happened, they're both offering independent versions of the events.

And a lot of what Lopez says is consistent with a lot of what Mirkarimi says.

She tells Noyes that she was never afraid of her husband or fearful for their son. She says that she thought her neighbor, Ivory Madison, was an attorney and that the video -- designed to be used in a possible future custody battle -- would be confidential. (Madison's lawyer disputes that.) She tells more or less the same tale of that New Year's Eve that Mirkarimi does.

She also says there was no prior incidence of domestic violence -- that her comments on the tape about "the second time" referred only to an earlier verbal argument about her travel to Venezuala.

Not defending Mirkarimi's actions here (and no, trolls, I never have). Just saying that it's important to hear his wife's (presumably) unvarished version of events when we make judgments around whether he should keep his job. (The mayor never bothered to talk to Lopez before he filed official misconduct charges).

I don't think the embattled sheriff was happy to hear his wife say that the couple may divorce, or that she may not return to San Francisco (the city, she says -- justifiably -- hasn't been nice to her).

But I think the voice of Eliana Lopez has been missing too long in this whole political battle, and I'm glad to see she's speaking out.

$3,000 an hour -- is that fair?

tim — Fri, 25 May 2012 20:57:30 +0000

Does anyone really think it's ok for the average CEO to make so much more money than the average worker that a person earning the median income in this country would have to work 244 years to earn what the median CEO earns in a year?

I mean, I think $3,072 an hour is pretty excessive pay for anyone, but let's give the conseratives their due: The person worked hard, and deserves to earn what the maket will pay him or her. If the typical worker in this country earned $500 an hour, that would be fine -- the person at the top ought to earn more than his or her employees (at least, that the capitalist way) -- but multiples of 244-1 are excessive an unstable.

Why not link CEO pay to the pay of the average worker? Why not say that no CEO can get more than 10 times (or even 20 times) what the lowest-paid person at that company makes? Nice incentive to pay your workers more.

Have at it, trolls.

City weighs artificial turf fields in Golden Gate Park

steven — Wed, 23 May 2012 23:26:52 +0000

The brightly illuminated artificial turf fields would be adjacent to Ocean Beach.

[[UPDATE 5/25: The project was approved]] The San Francisco Planning and Recreation & Park commissions will hold a special joint hearing tomorrow (Thurs/24) afternoon to consider approving the Beach Chalet Athletic Fields Renovation, a controversial city proposal to replace the natural grass fields on the west end of Golden Gate Park with artificial turf.

The $48 million project – years in development by Recreation & Park officials and championed by department head Phil Ginsburg, who has aggressively tried to monetize the city's parks – has inflamed the passions of both supporters and opponents, who are expected to jam into the 3 pm hearing in City Hall's Room 400 to deliver hours' of testimony. [Correction: Patrick Hannan with City Fields Foundation says this is a $14 million project, part of its overall $48 million artificial turf program for the city.]

Supporters say there aren't enough fields in the city for young soccer players and the existing fields there are in bad shape and without adequate lighting. In addition to the artificial turf, which the City Fields Foundation (created and funded by the Fisher family, founders of The Gap) has been helping to install in parks throughout the city, the project would include 150,000-watt lighting 60 feet in the air to illuminate the fields until 10 pm, year-round.

Opponents of the project, which include primarily environmentalists and park neighbors, cite a litany of problems with the project, saying it violates city plans that call for the park to remain a natural area open to all park users. They say it will disturb wildlife, increase traffic (much of it from out-of-towners who rent the fields), and create potentially toxic runoff in a sensitive habitat.

“Golden Gate Park is a unique, magnificent, and world-famous San Francisco treasure. It was conceived to serve as an open space preserve in the midst of San Francisco – a cultivated pastoral and sylvan landscape. It was designed to afford opportunities for all to experience beauty and tranquility. Plastic fields that are brightly lighted until 10 pm every night of the year are entirely out of place in this setting. The western end of Golden Gate Park should remain a part of the cohesive naturalistic environment envisioned by the Park's creators,” Katherine Howard of SF Ocean Edge, which organized in opposition to the project, wrote in a May 22 letter to the two commissions.

While it will be a joint hearing, the Planning Commission is charged with approving the project's environmental impact report and the RPC will consider approval of the project itself. But judging from the long list of angry comments to our last story on the subject by people on both sides of the debate, this divisive project will likely be the subject of appeals and lawsuits for months or years to come.

A few problems with Facebook

tim — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:04:59 +0000

I'm (clearly) not a stock market analyst or Wall Street Whiz (if I was that smart, how come I'm not rich?), but I have to say, some of the stuff that's coming out about the Facebook IPO makes this social media company that lives on its users' content and that's been portrayed as the company of the future look an awful lot like some rotten companies of the past. Sfist has an overview here.

Gawker is particularly harsh:

And the fallout from the most hyped IPO in history bursts not just the illusion that Facebook is actually worth $100 billion, but the idea that Facebook is different than any other corporation hell-bent on making as much money as possible for a handful of very wealthy people ... For a company which Mark Zuckerberg boasted in a letter to investors "was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission," Facebook sure as hell acted like a company in helping to enrich insiders at the expense of public investors.

The way IPO's often work is no secret -- the underwriters try to create a furor of hype around the company so that the early investors (the pals of those underwriters) get in at a low price that soars quickly so they make a nice neat profit. In this case, that only worked for the folks who bought early and sold very fast.

Now Facebook and the underwriters are getting sued, and corporate lawyers will be getting rich (note to Facebook's counsel: Get paid in cash, not stock).

But the Facebook employees who got stock as part of the IPO will still be pretty rich, and they'll still be driving up real-estate prices in the Bay Area, and my trolls will still be telling me I hate and envy success. (Or maybe I measure success in ways that don't include personal wealth.)

At any rate, a lot of investors lost money on this deal, but Mark Zuckerberg won't miss any meals.

Lee shows his pro-biz chops, but how is his balance?

steven — Tue, 22 May 2012 23:30:45 +0000

Mayor Ed Lee has business booming, but can he solve the city's other needs?

Mayor Ed Lee is on the roll these days, with a string of recent pro-business successes capped off by today's announcement that the Golden State Warriors are moving to San Francisco and building a new arena at Piers 30-32. But Lee faces a series of tricky balancing acts in the coming weeks as he tries to compensate for his strong economic development focus, which is driving up residential and commercial rents and threatening the city's diversity and livability.

Lee has been overly enamored by tech companies since taking office, from pushing through last year's tax breaks for Twitter and Zynga to his announcement a couple weeks ago that Yelp was expanding into a 100,000-square foot space in SoMa. “Yelp’s lease brings the total tally for technology leasing to more than two million square feet,” his office boasted in a press release. “Comparatively, this milestone was reached in the fall of 2011, indicating that the technology industry is increasing their role as a key driver in the office leasing marketplace and job creation in San Francisco.”

That's great for residents who work in tech companies that are awash in venture capital from Ron Conway or the other billionaires who funded Lee's mayoral campaign, or for the commercial landlords taking advantage of the latest tech bubble. But it's not so great for the nonprofits and small businesses who are having a hard time with making rents that are being steadily driven up -- or even for the cultural cache of a city being steadily overrun by boring Google-busers.

Contrary to right-wing fairy tales, policies that favor wealthy investors don't really help the average San Franciscans much, and they need to be balanced by policies and taxes that see to the common good. That's been crystal clear for a long time when it comes to San Francisco's housing policy, which is why Lee today is submitting his proposal for a Housing Trust Fund to be placed on the November ballot.

Details are still being worked out even as I write this, but the Chronicle reports that it proposes to initially generate $20 million per year by slightly increasing the real estate transfer tax, diverting a bit of the city's hotel tax, and then trying to set aside some future property taxes, with the goal of eventually reaching $50 million per year.

Unfortunately, that would barely put a dent the affordable housing needs identified in the city's Housing Element, which says about 60 percent of all new housing construction should be affordable to prevent gentrification and its associated problems (more commuter traffic, loss of diversity, etc.), which the Board of Supervisors already exacerbated last week by greenlighting the 8 Washington project for the super-rich.

And Lee's compromise with developers and the business community on his housing trust fund makes things even worse by diverting $15 million into a down payment assistance program for middle-class homebuyers (in a city where two-thirds of residents rent, and in a country that should have learned not to lure more families into overextending themselves to buy houses) and actually reduced the number of below-market-rate units that developers are required to build.

Granted, these are tricky problem fraught with complicated politics, particularly as we approach the deadline for submitting ballot measures for a fall election when only a simple majority is needed to pass revenue measures, a once every four year anomaly. As we reported last week, Lee is currently in the throes of final negotiations for his business tax reform measure, with labor and progressives putting the pressure on to back off his insistence that it be revenue-neutral.

That will be an important indicator of whether Mayor Lee will be content with simply catering to corporations and staying focused on his neoliberal economic development agenda – or whether he is serious about maintaining this city's socioeconomic diversity (being a “city for the 99 percent,” as he said in his inaugural address) and taking a more balanced approach to governance.

Lee seems to understand the situation better than his predecessor, Gavin Newsom, who wasn't willing to risk any political capital to solve the city's most vexing problems or to make any big asks of downtown (or even to keep the 49ers in town). Whereas Newsom was willing to basically give Piers 30-32 away to Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison to secure the overhyped America's Cup, Lee allowed that real estate deal to wither without losing the race and found what at first glance seems like a better deal for Piers 30-32: an arena built with private money.

But in the housing fund, business tax reform, CPMC's massive hospital and housing project, and budget fights that will unfold in the coming weeks (the mayor's budget is due June 1), Lee will demonstrate whether he has the political skills, the long-term vision, and the populist perspective to do right by all San Franciscans, or whether he'll cling to his belief that a handful of business elites should be trusted with the future of this great city.

Facebook IPO: The good and the bad

tim — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:09:25 +0000

Facebook went public and the people who got in at the initial price of $38 made a little money, but the stock is hardly exploding in the way that suggests social-networking is the next stock market darling. In fact, right after Facebook started selling, Zynga (which gets the vast majority of its revenue from Facebook) collapsed so quickly that trading was halted.

Still, about 1,000 Facebook employees are a lot richer today, and Mark Zuckerberg will join the likes of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison atop the Forbes 400 leaderboard. The state of California gets a nice bump, too -- according to some accounts, the state will eventually pick up close to $1 billion in tax revenue when the Facebook Fuckinzillionaires exercize their options and start selling their stock.

But for all the rest of us? Sure, increased consumer spending will help the local economy (dealers in luxury cars are drooling in their cheap coffee). But if that's not your line of work, you may not be so lucky.

The biggest factor in lifestyle and economic security in San Francisco is the cost of housing -- and that's going the wrong way. The Chron estimates that the total increase in the housing market will approach $1 billion, which doesn't seem all the much spread around the Bay Area, but it will be concentrated in a few popular places, and the east side of San Francisco, particularly Noe Valley, the Mission and surrounding nabes, will be part of ground zero.

Meaning if you are looking to rent or buy a place in this city, you just lost a bunch of money. That is, you will now have to pay more for your housing, which will be a net benefit to landlords and sellers.

And it's not necessarily such good news for small business and other startups:

The winners are of course the 1,000 or so Facebook employees who will cash-in, however the losers will be the rest of Silicon Valley for the following reasons. Housing prices will rise across the whole Bay Area. For local businesses and start-ups, recruiting due to difficulty moving to this area because of those rising prices

Go at it, trolls. Tell me I'm utterly wrong. Because it seems like those non-radical types at the Chron and Trulia seem to agree with me that there's a downside here, too.

New JFK bike lanes are bad for everyone

steven — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:28:14 +0000

Golden Gate Park visitors have had a couple months to get used to the confusing new lane configurations on JFK Drive – with bike lanes along the edges of the road and a row of parked cars in the middle – and I have yet to hear from anyone who likes this design. Nice try, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, but this design isn't working for any road users and should be scrapped.

The idea of using a row of parked cars to separate cyclists from motorists isn't inherently bad, and it has worked well in some European cities. But the way this is designed, passengers exiting vehicles must cross the bike lane to get to the sidewalk, creating a conflict that isn't good for either user. It was intended to create safer bikeways, but they actually feel more dangerous and uncertain now.

There are buffer zones where motorists aren't supposed to park, but on busy days they do anyway, with little to fear from parking control officers who rarely venture into the park, often crowding into the bike lane. The design also accentuates the visual blight of automobiles in this beautiful park, with more lanes of cars dominating the viewscape in many spots.

And I'm not the only one who feels this way. After my cover story on urban cycling last week, I got a few notes critical of the new design, including an email from longtime local cyclist Thomas Kleinhenz, who wrote, “When the new Golden Gate Park bike lanes went in I scratched my head. Who dreamt this up. It helps no one. Cyclists now ride in a lane between the curb on the right and parked cars on the left. You have cyclists, roller-bladers, rental bikers, and children all stuck in the same lane with pedestrians trying to get to and from their cars.”

Kleinhenz cited state road design manuals discouraging this kind of design, claiming they may even be illegal. He continued, “When I've ridden it, I've had to dodge a child darting out from between the cars and a family of 5 who strolled across the bike lane confused about where to go. I've also been stuck behind Segways and rental bikers, forcing me and another rider to go out into the traffic lane just to top 5 mph. But of course the traffic lanes are now thinner to make room for the new bike lanes. So we're left with one non-functional, unsafe lane and another mildly functional unsafe lane. Meanwhile cars have less room to maneuver, and people getting out of their parked cars are forced to try to avoid traffic on one side and cyclists on the other. While cyclists who don't want to deal with the congestion in the bike lane now must be aware of having car doors opened into them in the now narrower traffic lane.”

His comments are typical of others that I've heard, including those from transportation engineers who are similarly baffled by the choices made here. The SFMTA deserves credit for trying something new, but I'll give them even more credit if they just call this one a mistake and start over. And that is a possibility.

“We're going to continue monitoring the JFK bikes lanes closely and we will consider potential adjustments to make them more intuitive and user-friendly,” SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told us, adding that the agency will analyze changes in traffic speed and volumes for both cyclists and motorists and parking volume, as well as surveying people's perceptions of the project.

Hopefully some changes will be in the offing, but I think the project is an example of a bigger problem that I discussed in last week's article, and that is political and civic leaders going with the easy bicycle infrastructure projects so they can claim lots of new mileage rather than the more politically difficult projects we actually need.

Last year on Bike to Work Day, newly minted Mayor Ed Lee announced two bike projects: the JFK lanes and new cycletracks on the dangerous few blocks on Fell and Oak streets to connect the Panhandle with the Wiggle, which has long been a high priority for cyclists as it completes a popular east-west bike corridor. Well, the former project got done and the latter got delayed when neighbors complained about the lost parking spots.

Now, because the SFMTA tried to accommodate motorists with too many new parking spots in Golden Gate Park – despite previous promises to decrease street parking in the park in exchange for building a massive underground parking lot – we've ended up with a messy design that only exacerbates conflicts between motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists. In their effort to please everyone, as is often the case, they have pleased nobody.

June 6 hearing may spell the end of HANC recycling center

yael — Thu, 17 May 2012 22:23:32 +0000

Some beds at HANC's community garden, with the recycling center in the background

GUARDIAN PHOTO BY YAEL CHANOFF

It’s just a triangle of land on Frederick Street, right next to Kezar Stadium. But the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) recycling center has been the subject of years of political battles- and depending on the results of a June 6 hearing, they may get shut down for good.

HANC got an eviction notice in December 2010. HANC’s lawyer, Robert DeVries, successfully challenged the eviction. The Recreation & Parks department sued for eviction again in in June 2011, and that matter may finally come to a close June 6. The Guardian is awaiting comment from Rec & Parks.

In December, the Planning Commission approved a plan to turn the site into a community garden. They meant a garden run by Rec & Parks, not HANC. But HANC got to work building one, and Executive Director Ed Dunn is proud to say that they did so “without a cent of taxpayer money.”

Dunn emphasizes that “over the course of the past year or so the operation has been completely transformed.” The new community garden has 50 beds, which resident gardener Greg Gaar says are divided into about 100 plots, are are planted with mostly native plants that are currently in full bloom.

“We could build one community garden like this per month at no cost to the city,” said Dunn, referencing a recent SPUR report that talked about the benefits and challenges of urban agriculture.

Said Dunn, “we can help fill in some of those challenges.”

The center has a history of working on the cutting edge of environmentally friendly trends. The site at 780 Frederick was established as a recycling center in 1974, a decade before San Francisco implemented curbside recycling. The curbside program became fully operational in the early ‘90s. But 18 recycling centers remain in the city- and state Bottle Bill laws require the existence of recycling centers in "convenience zones." Dunn says the HANC recycling center fulfills the legal requirement to be nearby a recycling center for several supermarkets.

Now, many San Francisco residents rely on curbside recycling, rather than trucking their bottles, cans, and paper products to a recycling center. But a large population uses recycling centers- for excess amounts of recyclables that don’t fit in the bins, other material that doesn’t fit like large cardboard, or to generate income. Those who benefit from money traded for recyclables include housed people looking to supplement income, often immigrants and the elderly, and people living on the streets. But the center's opponents have painted the population it serves as mostly or all homeless, and the city has argued for its eviction on the grounds that the recycling center attracts homeless people to the area.

“[Gavin Newsom] thought the eviction was one way they could ward off camping in Golden Gate Park,” said Dunn.

Some neighbors have raised concerns about the noisy garbage-picking in the nightime, and questioned the need for recycling centers with curbside in place. If the center is shut down, though, it won't signal the end of recycling centers or those who benefit from them. It will likeley change where people go to cash in on recyclables; HANC's recycling center is centrally located, while the majority of San Francisco's recycling centers are in neighborhoods on the city's borders, including several in Bayview-Hunters Point.

Regardless of the centers effects on the community, HANC’s landlord, Rec & Parks, doesn’t legally need a reason to evict them- they just need to give notice. HANC has fought the eviction, but after almost two years of successful stalling, Rec & Parks may finally succeed.

What small business owners care about

tim — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:57:57 +0000

Since the mayor's office still insists that any business-tax reform ought to be revenue-neutral, and since he and other continue to talk about the myth that a payroll tax hurts job growth, I found the latest Bank of America survey of local small business owners fascinating.

Here's what the survey found: Small business owners are concerned about (1) the cost of healthcare (2) access to credit and (3) finding qualified employees. Local taxes aren't even on the list.

Now, if you ask almost any business operator whether he or she would like to pay lower taxes, most will probably say, sure. And I agree that a gross receipts tax is a better way of spreading the burden around. But the notion that slightly raising business taxes would hinder job growth in any significant way isn't supported by reality.

In fact, if you used higher taxes to improve the schools (and thus the education of the future workforce) it would do more to keep employers from leaving San Francisco than cutting taxes. If the state of California went to a single-payer health-care system -- dramatically reducing the cost to employers -- it would do more to attract jobs to this state than all the tax cuts in a Republican's wet dreams.

And if Bank of America and Wells Fargo would start loaning money to small businesess, you'd see almost immediate job growth.

How's that for a Small Business Week agenda?

Recology's slate cards

tim — Thu, 17 May 2012 00:04:12 +0000

It's everywhere!

Wow. Every single slate card I've seen so far for this election has been paid for at least in part by Recology, which is fighting a measure that would require competitive bidding on its garbage contract.

The Richmond Democratic Club. The Teacher's Union. The SF Women's Political Committee. The SF Democratic Party. The Milk Club. The Alice B. Toklas Club. I'm sure there are a few more out there. And every one has a big "No on A" ad on the back.

The good news is that a lot of these mailers list good candidates for the County Central Commitee, and getting their message out to more people helps. And this is nothing new -- everyone looks to the people with money to fund slate cards, and Recology's spending a lot of money this spring. And I'm confident that every one of these groups took a No on A position before they asked for slate-card money.

Still: You look at the pile and it looks like Recology owns San Francisco politics.