San Francisco Bay Area News - Crosscurrents from KALW

Crosscurrents: March 10, 2010

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:58:27 +0000

Homeless shelters in San Francisco, a photographic documentary of Stockton's foreclosure crisis, an opera about sex in the Bible, and local musicians Duo Revirado.

A haunting portrait of the foreclosure crisis

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:10:58 +0000

California's financial crisis has forced many people into homelessness and many people have abandoned their homes. The city of Stockton has one of the highest home foreclosure rates in the country. Forbes recently ranked it the second most miserable city in America.

When the foreclosure crisis hit Stockton, photographer Kirk Crippens became curious about what went wrong. He used his camera to capture the schrapnel — scenes that changed him forever.

KALW’s Hana Baba visited Crippens at his SF MOMA exhibit entitled “Foreclosure, USA: The Great Recession.” He gave her a tour of the chilling photographs on display.

Note: The Foreclosure USA exhibit is showing through Friday, March 12 at SF MOMA’s Artists’ Gallery at Fort Mason in San Francisco. You can also see Kirk’s photos online.

This is your map on bikes

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:56:10 +0000

Google Maps just announced that it's added a feature to map optimum bicycle routes. So now when you hit the "get directions" button you can choose "By car," "By public transit," "Walking," and now: "Bicycling."

Marc Caswell, program manager for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition was excited by the news: "Absolutely this is a wonderful development," he said. But he also sounded a little rueful: The Bicycle Coalition has been working with regional transportation planners and the city of San Francisco to develop their own bike mapping tool. They are currently in early stages of testing. Nonetheless, this is ultimately good news for Caswell's cause. "Having one uniform tool that anyone can use throughout the nation will be really important, especially for new bicyclists," he said.

San Francisco isn't the only one upstaged by Google. Caswell noted that his hometown, Broward County, Florida, just released a web-based bike mapping tool on Monday. Clearly its an idea whose time has come.

This news doesn't mean that other bike mapping systems are now obsolete. At the very least, these systems will inform each other and set the bar for improvement. A number of the immediate reactions to the news have noted that Google recommends riding down busy streets or over hills.
"It's just not an easy task for a computer," Caswell said. "For years, people have been asking, why hasn't Google done this? Well, it's really hard for a computer to understand hills, and traffic speed, and how far people are willing to go out of their way to get to a bike lane."

If you don't want to be one of the guinea pigs working out the technical bugs, there are a lot of Web 0.0 solutions: The Bicycle Coalition gives out printed maps and it has a Bike Buddy program for people new to the area or new to biking. Just shoot them an email, and they will set you up with an experienced cyclist who lives in your neighborhood who can show you all the secret routes.

Sex and the Bible: The Opera

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:38:58 +0000

You may not learn this in Sunday School, but the Bible contains some pretty racy stuff. Using innocuous phrases like "to know" or "to lie with" someone, the Bible carries stories of incest, passion, and well, sex. Lots of sex.

Opera composer Mark Alburger saw the potential on this aspect of the Good Book, and so begat his latest work, called: Sex and the Bible: The Opera, running through this weekend at San Francisco's Community Music Center.

Reporter Bridget Huber has more.

NOTE: for any parents planning to click “Play” on this web story -- unless you want to have that talk right now, you might want to put on your headphones.

* * *

BRIDGET HUBER: It’s a story of lust, betrayal and revenge. It’s not reality TV--it’s the Good Book.

MARK ALBURGER: This is after Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot’s left with his two daughters and there are no men left. And the daughters say, “Come, let us make our father drunk and we will lie with him so that our race will not die out upon earth.” This is the first daughter.

That’s composer Mark Alburger.

ALBURGER: There's so much sex in the Bible, we couldn't even get through the book of Genesis.

Alburger’s new opera, “Sex and the Bible,” spotlights the scripture’s racy side.

ALBURGER: Abraham makes a covenant with God, and the deal is, he's got to get circumcised as an adult. So I thought it was important to write excessively beautiful music while these poor sods are getting circumcised.

Don’t expect any dusty desert, burlap robes or gladiator sandals. “Sex and the Bible” is set backstage at a Las Vegas burlesque club. Performers wear skin-tight body suits and take turns on the stage’s two stripper poles, says Baritone Nathaniel Marken.

NATHANIEL MARKEN: It’s the presumption that a bunch of Vegas types decided to tell bible stories with song. There’s boas laying around, there’s lingerie…

It’s a far cry from what they teach in Sunday School.

MARKEN: We learn the basic parable we’re supposed to take away from the stories, but in terms of the nitty-gritty messiness that’s really in the Old Testament, it tends to be glossed over when the stories are told. There’s a lot of layers and subtext there that we flesh out--no pun intended--and play with.

ALBURGER: So I suppose the orgasm is a scene change, right? We measure this tome in orgasms: it’s another orgasm, it’s another scene. Bernstein was big on that, right? If the music doesn't give me an etcetera, it's not worth it.

Alburger grew up Catholic and says he has huge respect for the Bible. Everything—the incest, the wife swapping, the prostitution—it’s all straight out of scripture. But seeing Alburger’s opera is little like reading a steamy romance novel, where you flip ahead to the juicy bits.

ALBURGER: It is nothing but the Bible. When people ask me, “Is it reverent? Is it respectful?”…well, it’s certainly light-hearted, and it’s fun. Like Martin Luther, the guy who started the reformation, said about music in general, he said, “Why should the devil get all the good tunes?” There was this implication that we should have some fun, too.

ALBURGER: This is the story of Jacob. He’s got a lot of wives. He’s got four wives and they sort of have a baby-producing contest. But first, he’s got to meet his wives and he really falls in love with Rachel at the well.

ALBURGER: So basically, Sex and the Bible is this frolic through the book of Genesis upholding the human spirit. That, despite the fact that these stories come down to us from 2000 years ago, they had all of our faults, all of our passions, and they were just like us.

Bridget Huber is a student reporter from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

San Francisco's shelter system leaves some out in the cold

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:06:23 +0000

In January, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his goal to reduce the number of homeless people on San Francisco’s streets by 50% and the city’s overall homeless count by 30% by the end of 2010. And he vowed not to leave office before his goals were met. Newsom’s New Year’s resolution is an ambitious one, and he hasn't given any concrete details on how he would finance his plan in the face of a $522 million budget deficit for the coming fiscal year. He also hasn't said where the approximately 3,200 homeless people currently on the streets will go.

Emergency shelters and resource centers have been closing their doors or reducing their hours, affordable housing is still not keeping up with demand, and the number of homeless people in San Francisco has been increasing slowly but steadily since 2005 -- despite the Mayor's efforts. KALW's Ali Budner reports on life in the city's homeless shelters -- from both sides of the administrative desks.

* * *

ALI BUDNER: Tanya Figueroa is warm and kind. Her thin, wrinkle-laden face shows a lifetime of laughter, but there’s little now. She’s chronically homeless.

TANYA FIGUEROA: By the time I get up and before my feet hit the ground, my bed’s been taken.

It’s morning, and Tanya Figueroa has come to the MNRC -- The Mission Neighborhood Resource Center -- to begin the daily ritual of securing a bed in one of the city’s eight adult homeless shelters. The waiting room buzzes with activity. Dozens of people are gathered around tables, talking, resting their heads, or staring into space.

NATE MILLER: It’s packed in here in the mornings. We’ll have to lock it. Full capacity.

Nate Miller is a staff member at MNRC. The waiting room walls are lined with metal lockers. There’s a nook with a payphone. An altar by the door remembers homeless people who’ve died. And of course, there’s the reservation desk, where another staff member sits with a solitary computer.

MILLER: As soon as people get here, the beds usually start dropping at 7 and then people don’t get beds and still wait around for a while.

When Miller talks about beds “dropping,” there are no pillows or sheets falling from the sky. He means numbers are appearing on the city’s computerized shelter reservation system, known by the acronym CHANGES. The MNRC is one of just a handful of places in the city where homeless people can sign up for a shelter bed. But Miller says it’s not that easy.

MILLER: So you make a reservation for bed 22 on the fourth floor at MSC South or something. So it’s kind of like just booking it on Expedia or something except that as soon as they open up, you have to get them right away, so we’re actually racing against the other places that make reservations.

The CHANGES computer system was created in 2004 in an effort to centralize homeless shelter reservations and make the process uniform for all clients. Whereas once, people would wait in line at a given shelter and go through a lottery for a bed at that site, now, of course, everything happens on a computer. But computers can fail. And at MNRC, where only one computer is connected to the CHANGES system, any malfunction can mean people might not get housed for the night.

LAURA GUZMAN: The system sometimes does not accurately portray what is the capacity of the shelter. So the shelter may be more full than what the system shows. And CHANGES has been a complicated program and a program that breaks very easily.

Laura Guzman is director of the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center.

GUZMAN: That’s why you hire people who are really fast with computers. [laughs]

Joyce Crum knows it can be difficult. She’s Director of Housing and Homelessness at San Francisco’s Human Services Agency.

JOYCE CRUM: One of the safety nets we implemented in the very beginning, because we were having a lot of computer bugs, is the resource center would call the shelters and say “I have a group of people standing here, do you have any shelter beds?” And if they did, “Send em over, give me their names,” and they’d check 'em in that way. So it was merely picking up the phone to interact and don’t let the computer system thwart you from doing what you need to do.

But Sen Bivens, a staff member at MNRC, says the problems run deeper than that, because of a lack of shelter beds.

SEN BIVENS: I used to be able to make a call: “I have an at risk senior here, that’s on crutches. They have a broken foot, or whatever.” I could get them accommodated. Now, it’s a crapshoot. I can call, they’ll say no I don’t have any beds. You just have to go with the system. You know it’s... I’m at a loss for words. I just get a lot of angry people. We have a woman over here right now. She’s very angry she didn’t get a bed. She says she’s been waiting for three days.

More than 6,500 people are homeless in San Francisco, according to an official city count in January 2009. In 2002, the year before Mayor Gavin Newsom took office, the official count found more than 8,600. That overall reduction is a plank in the Mayor’s political platform, though homeless advocates dispute those numbers. What’s clear is this: with the recent budget crisis, shelters and resource centers have been shutting down and reducing their hours.

GUZMAN: Since Mayor Newsom has been mayor, we have lost 464 sleeping units in the emergency homeless shelter system.

Again, MNRC Director Laura Guzman.

GUZMAN: Since last October, we have seen an increase of about 68% on the number of people who come every day to drop in and many of those are shelter seekers. And we really have been talking about reaching an emergency crisis around the lack of shelter beds, given the needs.

While Guzman believes making more beds available would help solve the emergency shelter crisis, Joyce Crum, of the Human Services Agency, says the city aims instead to channel more resources into permanent housing options.

CRUM: I can tell you our goal is not to open more shelters. Our goal is always focusing on bringing on more housing. We will definitely maintain our current stock of shelter but no, there is no goal to expand shelter. Because you can expand, you can expand, you can expand, you know, and what does that do? I think one of the criticisms that I would have of the advocates is that shelters is not a house. And we don’t want people permanently living in our shelters.

Yet many still rely on the 1,226 beds in San Francisco’s emergency shelters each night. So people like Tanya Figueroa are taking their situation day by day.

FIGUEROA: Every day I gotta come down here and get a single bed. Every day... I was in 103 the night before last and I was in bed 43 last night, the same place. And last night when I lay down there was eight beds that I counted that were empty at 11 p.m. at night.

MNRC Director Laura Guzman, has one explanation for those empty beds. She points out that roughly 30% of the beds in San Francisco’s emergency shelters are set aside for participants in The County Adult Assistance Program, or CAAP, also known as General Assistance, or GA. It’s part of Mayor Newsom’s Care Not Cash program: some qualifying homeless people are offered stipends for housing. If no housing is available, Guzman says, they’re guaranteed a shelter bed.

GUZMAN: The whole debate when Mayor Newsom proposed the Care Not Cash was whether or not people were going to have housing, but the reality was there was not enough housing so shelters became equal to a housing benefit.

CAAP participants who qualify for emergency shelter have beds attached to their names for up to 45 days, whether they sleep in them or not. And many do not. A CAAP bed can only be made available to other bed-seekers for one-night stints if the person it belongs to does not check in by curfew. But often, that’s too late for anyone else to make use of it. MNRC’s Laura Guzman:

GUZMAN: We know that people who get GA have a right to their shelter bed and yet many people do not occupy those beds. When we have all these other folks, people who have disabilities, people who are not on government benefits, who could really utilize those beds for more than one night.

Advocates like Guzman lobbied the city. And last July, Joyce Crum and San Francisco’s Human Services Agency addressed the problem.

CRUM: By changing the system, and doing away with a number of the referral beds and reducing the number of CAAP beds, we added 200 additional beds to the resource centers.

Still, reserved shelter beds lie empty, and with a glitch-prone computer reservation system, many people still end up sleeping on San Francisco’s streets. For the last five years, the official count of homeless people in San Francisco has been rising. Meanwhile, another emergency shelter is slated to close this June. It will be converted into permanent housing for veterans and for seniors. That’s good for them. Advocates like those at the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center will continue pursuing shelter beds for the rest. But at the end of the day, there’s no guarantee the computer will grant those homeless people a place to sleep.

In San Francisco, I’m Ali Budner for Crosscurrents.

To carry or not to carry

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:18:55 +0000

It’s a gray Saturday morning at an outdoor mall in Walnut Creek. Elevator music quietly plays from speakers hovering above the manicured walkway. This is Locust Street: clean, safe, lined with upscale retail clothing stores and chain restaurants; a place where you’d be comfortable taking your family.

While a few people casually make their way to brunch dates or weekend sales at the many adjacent department stores, a noticeable crowd of men, women and children is building around the Buckhorn Grill. On the margins of the crowd stands Jerry Jeung: a kind-looking, middle-aged loss-prevention officer from Antioch. Jeung’s eight-year-old son Jarrett hangs off his left side, peering at the group pouring out of the Buckhorn Grill. And hanging off Jeung’s right side is a Glock Model 20 10 mm Auto Pistol.

Many people in the crowd of 75 are looking at Jeung’s weapon. Actually, they’re not so much looking at the firearm; they’re looking for it. Here, a gun is a sign of camaraderie, a symbol of mutual understanding and simpatico politics. As I approach the group, several eyes glance toward my hips. Gun-less, I feel somewhat underdressed and exposed.

It’s easy to understand why the members of this gathering are eager to visually pat me down and identify whether I stand with them or not. This is an unofficial demonstration of Bay Area Open Carry, a loosely affiliated group of locals exercising their second amendment rights to carry an unloaded firearm in public. They’ve been making national news lately with these demonstrations, forcing restaurants and cafes to pick sides on whether they’ll welcome or ban open-carriers in their storefronts. Peet’s and California Pizza Kitchen have taken a stand against the open-carriers, while Starbucks maintains that it’s open for business to both the armed and unarmed.

The political drama surrounding the situation seems a little bit overblown given my experience this morning. While these guys (literally—only men are carrying today) are technically packing heat, “gun-toting” is hyperbolic. This demonstration is about as action-packed as a book reading. Instead of reaching for their guns, these open carriers are reaching for pamphlets; instead of distributing lead, they’re delivering political viewpoints.

No guns are loaded or drawn today. The first and obvious reason is that, frankly, it’s the law. (A gun can’t be drawn unless a life is at stake.) Some open-carriers might also argue that no evil-minded criminal would dare to pull a weapon on a group so readily and rationally armed.

And yet, I can’t remove a third reason from my mind: we’re at a family-friendly restaurant in a suburban shopping mall.

And that seems to be the strange tension about the Open Carry movement: the demonstrations themselves don’t seem to necessarily demonstrate anything. One female supporter who isn’t carrying a gun tells me that the main argument behind the right to carry a firearm is safety: by having a gun on your person, you can defend yourself in a sticky situation. In addition, by having the gun visible, you reduce the potential for crime in your proximity. It would seem that demonstrating the value of carrying a firearm might be better achieved in a more active way: say, walking the streets of a crime-ridden neighborhood rather than lunching at Walnut Creek’s Buckhorn Grill.

Still, it makes sense that pulling a gun should always be a last resort, and that its usefulness hopefully won’t need to be proved.

About a week after the Bay Area Open Carry gathering, Buckhorn Grill management banned guns in their chain of restaurants. Still, the demonstrations—or moral-support gatherings—continue to make noise. Hopefully, that noise won’t include a bang.

Duo Riverado

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:47:53 +0000

This music is by a couple of Bay Area musicians known as Duo Revirado. They're performing March 11 at The Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco.

The Criminal Justice Conversations Podcast with David Onek, Part 3

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:55:19 +0000

The Criminal Justice Conversations Podcast, a co-production of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice and the Berkeley School of Journalism, features in-depth, thirty-minute interviews with a wide range of criminal justice leaders: law enforcement officials, policymakers, advocates, service providers, academics and others.

The weekly Podcast, hosted by criminal justice expert David Onek, gets behind the sound bites that far too often dominate the public dialogue about criminal justice, to have detailed, nuanced conversations about criminal justice policy.

In this third part in the series, Matthew Cate, Secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, discusses the Department’s new parole policies, the importance of research in guiding policy decisions, his prior work as Inspector General of the agency he now leads, his advice for the next Governor on California corrections, and more.

You can find more information on the podcast here.

Connecting the dots: top news stories for 2010 03 10 - Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:40:44 +0000

Big political moves are making headlines in today's news. In Sacramento, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing for off-shore oil drilling by saying he doesn't want to rely "on people who hate us" for petroleum. He may get some support from Bay Area drivers, as gas prices have pumped up in the past month...

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has put his cards on the table, coming out with a strong stance on illegal immigration...

Meanwhile, another Republican who recently came out is under fire from his own party for misleading his constituents about, among other things, his sexual orientation...

In San Francisco, the LGBT Center is facing foreclosure and has asked the city for a bailout...

And San Francisco supervisors are looking to snuff out smoking in even more public places...

A local boxer has been making a name for herself and for Filipina purveyors of the sweet science, by snuffing out opponents in the squared circle...

And a local educator, who happens to be the son of a Mexican president, is teaching Mexican history to Berkeley students from a first-person perspective...

A Palo Alto man would like to distance himself from international politics, as he's fighting Egyptian claims that he's a spy...

People imprisoned in Alameda County jail may have trouble getting health care if a union conflict continues...

Elsewhere in Alameda County, a $2.5 million organ is the new crown jewel of the $172 million Cathedral of Chris the Light in Oakland...

And, on a slightly smaller scale, a Bay Farm Island family has turned its living room into a Gothic cathedral with stone walls, stained glass and pointy arches.

Connecting the Dots brings the day's news together

Crosscurrents: March 9, 2010

kalwnews@gmail.com (KALW News) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:55:57 +0000

Worker-owned co-ops, program director Vicki Ho on the San Francisco Asian-American Film Festival, NARIKA support program for southeast Asian women, and local band The Pleasure Kills.