Prop C and Prop E in November 2012

Everyone besides the people I know who are super involved in SPUR has been super quiet about these measures on the ballot, maybe because the election is still a few months away or maybe because everyone is just talking about the presidential election these days. It is, after all, much more entertaining. Prop C and Prop E are some of the most important city-wide items on the ballot this election. Funding for affordable housing has been decreasing over the last few years and is now in a state of actual crisis. I’ve been following this issue for a while, and here’s a brief history.

In an attempt to spur construction projects in the city in 2010, Gavin Newsom passed legislation that would allow developers to defer the fee required if they wanted opted out of including affordable housing in their plans. Before this legislation 25% of developers opted to pay the fee, but now 55% of developers opt to pay the fee rather than build affordable units into their plans. This should theoretically be fine because revenue generated from the fee is supposed to be used to build affordable housing elsewhere, but 1) there’s a lag of 5 years in actually getting the money because of the deferral and 2) it’s really hard to get affordable housing projects off the ground to begin with. 

Back in December of 2011, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state’s law to abolish redevelopment agencies, a win for Jerry Brown by reducing the budget gap and allowing those funds to go to schools and public safety. Redevelopment agencies (with about $5.7 billion in funding a year state-wide) became a popular shell agency to get more funds that revitalize blighted areas after a proposition in 1978 limited the state’s ability to raise new revenues. Though they are far from perfect, in fact pretty corrupt, half of redevelopment funds in SF went to supporting affordable housing ($50m per year). Without the agencies, funding for affordable housing looks like this. 

Development of places like Mid-Market, Hunter’s Point, Mission Bay, and the many vacant lots you see in San Francisco were delayed because of this void in guaranteed funding sources. With rents rising to record highs, that’s not a pretty chart, so there obviously needs to be a a new solution to financing affordable housing in this city. People are moving out of San Francisco, causing the city to be less diverse and less livable for many people. Hell, we are even thinking about creating micro-apartments to make rent cheaper. 

Prop C creates an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that essentially gets funding from a few sources: gains from property taxes that used to go to redevelopment agencies, an increase in the transfer tax on the sale of properties valued over $1m, and new revenues generated from Prop E (also on the ballot). It’s a 30-year fund that would get $20m in its first year, increasing year over year, capped at $50m per year. Basically a guaranteed $1.2billion for affordable housing over the next 30 years. The city hopes to build 9k new units of affordable housing over the next 30 years. 

Prop E changes San Francisco’s business tax from a payroll based system to a gross receipts based system and will generate an additional $25.8m a year for the city. Right now companies paying more than $250k in payroll have to pay payroll taxes to the city. This issue was hotly debated when Twitter was considering moving out of the city because of it. With this new tax structure, labor intensive operations that don’t make that much money like restaurants and supermarkets will benefit, and firms that don’t employ as many people vs. revenue would have to pay more (like engineering or real estate firms). The tech community is for this because many internet companies don’t make a lot of money and employ expensive talent ^_^. Small businesses with less than $1m in revenue are exempt from this tax. This structure just makes sense in general, so very few people are against it.

In a perhaps desperate measure, Ed Lee allocated about half of the increased revenues from Prop E to fund the Affordable Housing Trust Fund created by Prop C, so the two are invariably linked. If Prop E doesn’t pass, he’ll have to veto Prop C. Some of the burden in building affordable housing is taken off of developers because the city will now purchase units at the market rate and reserve them for affordable housing. Nay say if you will, but developer interests will always lie with their pocketbooks, so we shouldn’t count on them to make decisions that are good for the city as a whole. Prop C is pretty much also the only choice we have right now in funding affordable housing. 

You can also read this nice summary of SPUR’s stance on these ballot measures written by Corey, a really smart dude who I sit on a working group with at SPUR. TL;DR - vote for Prop C and Prop E :). 

About three weeks ago, I moved away from Hayes Valley, one of those “modern neighborhoods” of San Francisco that had to basically rebuild itself after the earthquake. Even though there are certain pockets of sorrow, it has developed from an anemic jumble of high end boutiques and mediocre eateries to a lively gathering spot in the short time that I’ve lived there thanks to one of the greatest interim vacant land use projects I’ve seen so far. 

The little village of pop-up restaurants, food carts, and community hangouts that makes up the Proxy has given Hayes Valley a much-needed cultural renascence. Two of the best coffee roasters in the city, an outdoor beirgarten, a truck whose sole purpose is to sell meat, amongst other things. Some of our tour guides are even running their bike tours from that spot. Because there is no dedicated seating space associated with most venues, everything served from the Proxy is designed to be taken on the go, which results in people milling about various nearby public spaces eating ice cream or drinking coffee with their friends. I only wish that the shipping cargo containers were more aesthetically pleasing. 

Another one of my favorite Hayes Valley projects is the Hayes Valley Farm. I believe in principles of permaculture design and love their mission, but going to the farm always leaves me with a slight sense of alienation from other people. Everyone tends to the Earth, and sharing is a central motif, but oftentimes I think farmers seem to have some disdain towards the others - the consumers. Maybe it’s not as bad as this short suggests, and it’s probably the aura of not wanting to touch dirt that I give off. I am saddened that this project is slated to end this year with the development of (albiet much-needed) new housing. 

More and more specialty shops have been opening up - travel necessities, a Spanish food shop, a French gourmet shop, a meat shop, and so forth. These types of operations are inherently inefficient and don’t benefit from economies of scale, but the niche nature of each venue creates a sense of connectedness between the different businesses because each is reliant upon the others to exist. There needs to be a level of density and diversity for people to do the one thing they do well and are passionate about. On your way home, you can very conveniently walk into five shops to buy your meat, flowers, vegetables, cheeses, and coffee.

In places where the population is less dense, there tend to be big box retailers trying to meet all your needs and engaging price and resource wars with one another. It’s anti-community oriented, and every commercial entity just ends up catering towards the average person rather than each maintaining its own sense of character. That is why the suburbs always seem so soulless to a city person. 

I am going to miss Hayes Valley and feel slightly remorseful about abandoning my rent-controlled apartment, but I’m excited to see what it will evolve into. Plus, I have plenty of reasons to go back ;).

It was my third and final apartment viewing appointment of the day. I looked at the Craigslist ad with skepticism. There were no pictures, it was in all caps, and the location-price combination seemed too good to be true. $1800 for a one bedroom apartment in Hayes Valley. Someone once told me that in this market sometimes property managers will exclude pictures on purpose to deter the onslaught of inquiries, so I took a leap of faith and went to go check it out. 

This building was on Octavia Street, a Parisian-style boulevard rebuilt in 2005 after the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed the central freeway in 1989. City planners divided up the wide street with lines of trees, scattered in some public art, and placed benches smack dab in the middle of freeway ramp. Over the past few years, Hayes Valley has seen a rapid revitalization as long-time residents watched real estate speculators snatch up properties around them. Nowadays, the area right off the freeway is abuzz with people - rotating structures obtained from Burning Man, a playground, and the new Proxy development project filled with things like meat trucks and ice cream made with liquid nitrogen.

The apartment was in a reconstruction period style building with rounded bay windows followed by angular bay windows to break up the monotony of a long facade. There was a layer of clumpy grime that settled in the crevices of the building exterior, a remnant from years of neglect, fallen from the overhead freeway that cloaked the neighborhood in shadows for so long. The tattered sheets I could see through the windows eerily contrasted against the sunshine-filled green space with puppies running around merely ten feet away. There was a group of (seemingly) homeless people loitering right outside of the building as I walked up to it. As soon as I approached them, I wanted to leave.

“Are you my 6:30?” a dismal looking man called out from the crowd as he hobbled towards me with one shoulder and one eye permanently lagging below the other. I nodded and followed him into the building, staring at what looked like fifty identical keys weighing down and jingling against his belt loop, as everyone else stared behind us. He chuckled sinisterly as he led me up the stairs; the only time I’ve ever heard a similar laugh was when I was watching Breaking Bad, and one of the drug dealers got held up by meth addicts wielding a knife. Not a good sign. There was a layer of dust on the walls, and the carpet was stained with various substances - from booze to blood to dirt. 

The building smelled like a free clinic in the Tenderloin, a concoction of drugs, desolation, and languid human beings that haven’t moved for ages. Against all my instincts to escape, I followed him into the apartment and held my breath as he closed the door behind us.  ”Here’s the place. I’ve been living in this building for 47 years,” he chuckled (again eerily) as the sides of his lips curved up into a toothless smile. The apartment itself was not so bad because sunshine flooded in through the windows, and the carpet seemed to have been replaced maybe about a decade ago. 

I ended up feeling a bit more comfortable and asking him a few questions about what it was like living there and how the neighborhood had changed. He answered, friendly enough with some shrugs and grunts at first and then opened up a little after I smiled at one of his jokes. Some mutterings of how the owners never came around and the issues they had with development agencies came out of his mouth. “Well, I’ll give you a call if I am interested,” I said abruptly, the cue to leave. He showed me out, and the sordid odor of the rest of the building wafted over me once again. 

As we went down the stairs, a woman with heavy eyeliner and jeans about two sizes too small for her said hi to the building manager. She made brief eye contact with me and then immediately looked away. The guys hanging out outside were gone. I walked around the block a couple of times in a daze with this feeling of infinite sadness dragging at my heart. I wanted to cry, but instead I went to a French grocery store to buy some mushroom risotto and duck liver pâté to eat in my studio apartment a few blocks away.

Bar Agricole
355 Eleventh St. San Francisco, CA 94103

This morning we went to Bar Agricole, one of my favorite places in the South of Market (SOMA) district of San Francisco. Traditionally industrial and famous for the Folsom Street Fair, the SOMA district is a tough and somewhat seedy place devoid of the iconic Victorian homes that are so representative of San Francisco’s more residential districts.

This area is long due for a turnaround, though, with trendy places like Sightglass and Bar Agricole popping up. The interior is industrial chic with woods, metals, and even piping used as light fixture decoration, and I love it. The drinks are outstanding, food is imaginative, and there’s even a heated outdoors area that is kind of zen. The menu changes every day, and they specialize in bringing out bold, natural flavors in fruits and vegetables. 

Red Door Cafe
1608 Bush St. San Francisco, CA 94108

During my last day in SF before the holidays (in a last ditch effort to see everyone), we went to Red Door Cafe, which is now my favorite brunch place ever. They’re pretentious in a quirky, fabulous way - my favorite kind of pretentiousness. There’s always a line out the door because there are a total of six tables in the place. The owner, Ahmed, is a scantily clad flamboyant gay guy with wavy hair. This morning he was wearing his naughty holiday getup: cowboy (girl?) boots, booty shorts, and a Santa apron with no shirt underneath. 

You have to pass an interview to get in, and apparently sometimes they do reject people. When he first told us about the procedure, I said “well, duh, you gotta have standards,” and he handed me a doll with a missing leg. “This is your ticket in, honey. Her name is Tanya. Take care of her.” Christopher got a doll with a backwards head, and Wendy got a decapitated doll after he cooed over her outfit. As we were waiting in line, he gave us free tacos ‎and told us that “the fake meat is from today’s special, and it’s called I’m Nothing But a Dirty Vegetarian Whore.” It was amazing - the best taco I’ve had since I left Austin (hello, Torchy’s). That’s saying a lot.

Places that put on a show and and act snooty without being able to back it up with great food irk me the most. In this case, the food was definitely great. Christopher said it was the first time in a long time since he’d been genuinely excited about the food at a new place. I agree… and my “two titties” do too. If you want to know what I’m talking about, go there. Now. 

I recently answered my first non-trolling, vaguely helpful answer on Quora in a long time about what it’s like to be homeless in San Francisco: 

I’ve never been homeless, personally, but I do know quite a few homeless people from volunteering and interacting with them extensively through work. A lot of people are homeless for a variety of reasons: mental illness, drug addiction, disability, youthful naivety, troubled childhoods, persecution for sexual orientation (oftentimes the case for homeless teens that flee to SF), etc. There is no one answer for this, and you won’t really hear the same story more than once.

I’m not going to pretend that I can answer this question with any sort of authority and am only brushing the tip of the iceberg with some general sentiments and common threads. Being homeless is a lonely, emotionally taxing experience. Even though there is tenderness and compassion around every corner in the Tenderloin (you can’t go a block without finding multiple homeless service organizations with incredibly friendly people with beautiful souls), you still feel hopeless because trying to get out of homelessness seems so daunting.

Homeless people come from all over the state (and maybe even the country) to San Francisco because it has some of the best charitable organizations. Even if you go to a place that provides various helpful services, they can’t guarantee stability and oftentimes you have to go back and face the stark reality of the streets. Homeless shelters can offer a refuge for up to three months, but after that you have to re-apply, and there’s a long waiting list. If you live in a homeless shelter, there are usually significant constraints on free will like curfews that don’t allow you to go out past 8 PM.

If you know where to go and are diligent about the service hours, no one in this city will go hungry. There are tons of soup kitchens, Glide Foundation being a great one, that provide three meals a day and rarely turn anyone away. The food looks and smells unappetizing, but at least you get fed. Healthy San Francisco provides healthcare to the poor, but it doesn’t include vision and dental. Sometimes people will sell the food they get from shelters for money to buy their medications.

There can be really nice people, but in the end, it’s everyone for himself. There are drug dealers around every corner, and everyone in the community knows who they are. Many homeless people have kind of lost hope in trying to get out of it. It’s hard to get a job because they might seem dirty or mentally unstable to potential employers. They fall into a sort of daily rhythm and end up dragging their possessions from shelters to doorsteps to secluded street corners to even the steps of Civic Center Plaza every night.

A homeless friend of mine offers a tour through my company, but everything I say here is purely my opinion and does not in any way represent Vayable.

Today I went on a great farmer’s market adventure where we got to meet the farmers, learn about seasonal foods, get the scoop on what kinds of ingredients go best in certain recipes, and cook together with Sheila, a new friend and amazing guide! She was so sweet, accommodating all of our dietary restrictions and connecting with the farmers in advance so that they would be amenable to talking to us.

We started out the day at the nationally renowned Farmer’s Market and got some coffee at Blue Bottle, my favorite San Francisco coffee stop. We tried some peaches and got some baking tips from Aomboon, whose parents own K&J Orchards. Then we tried some exotic plant-foods, including something fuzzy and something sour, with Dave from Heirloom Organic Gardens. After we got the rest of our vegetables and fresh herbs, we walked down Embarcadero to Sheila’s amazing apartment above 21st Amendment! 

We downed some beer, turned on some funky music, and got down to cooking. After giggles and good conversation, we somehow came out with a zucchini goat cheese roll, a salad with grilled shrimp, garbanzo bean dough flat bread pizzas, and a peach crumble with green tea ice cream. We then proceeded to stuff our faces on her outdoor patio, where 21st Amendment actually brews their beer! 

At first I was like “meh, is this worth $60?” But it so is. Experiences like this are priceless, and I pretty much covered lunch and dinner with all the great food! It really is all about the company you keep that makes your life exciting and extraordinary. Plus, I learned how to drink seemingly prissy health drinks like wheatgrass shots! We got to connect with awesome farmers, have fun cooking delicious food, and make new friends!

You can check out her food blog here and book her experience here! 

get with the program at sfiff

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Today, we went to see Get with the Program, a series of animated shorts put on by the San Francisco International Film Festival. Altogether, I liked it, but I thought the pace was a bit slow, and the audience seemed like, as my friend said, “10x varsity league quiet game players.” In the drawn out transitions between sets, I was afraid to breathe because everyone was so quiet. I get that the opener, Self Portrait as a PowerPoint Proposal for an Amusement Park Ride, is a satire of bad PowerPoint presentations, and I laughed at the concept for just about five seconds, but Jonn Herschend also seems to think that people read really fucking slowly. Some of them, like Sync and Dromosphere, while remotely enjoyable, were also way too protracted and monotonous. If I’m going to look at flashy circles and lights for that long, I’d be transfixed by my screensaver all the time. Who has the attention span for this? 

I appreciated the two shorts that were meant to be commentaries about world affairs in the form of highly personal portraits. Arjun Rihan’s Topi was based on a true story of his great uncle as a child dealing with the palpable and violent ramifications of India’s partition in 1947. A child’s innocence, an adversary’s kindness, a sense of panicked fear in everyone, and the chaos of the turbulent times were vividly portrayed in this claymation. A Purpleman was about a North Korean man’s imprisonment, torture, release, and new life in South Korea. He can’t quite fit in and is treated poorly in his new home, but going back to where he came from would be far worse. Internal struggles of self-identity clash alongside with the wide-scale issues of repression, discrimination, and economic turmoil. 

Get with the Program is about order, conformity, disorder, and internal anguish. Everyone, even pinto bean shaped mechanobots, struggle for self-expression yet they fail in a society where everything is so mechanical. I love the cinematography and how everything is a system within another, more complex, system. The bots are beckoned by the call of omnipresent beings that dictate their lives because the entire scheme of existence will stop working if someone deviates. All “life,” if you can even call it that, is then assembled into newer, better, sexier technology that in turn feeds their addiction.

Pixels was one of my favorites of the night. A huge mass of pixels invades New York City in a Space Invaders meets King Midas fashion complete with old school arcade music. King Kong also destroys things as a giant frog leaps through the traffic and Tetris pieces collapse buildings. Another favorite was The External World, an absurd and perverted view of society in the innocent guise of a cartoon. I know there were some children in the audience, and this film was most certainly NSFW but oh so fabulously funny and quirky. Child abuse, death, decapitation, masturbation, child molestation, pixelated genitalia, suicide, murder, infanticide, vomit, and more death. Oh man, you just have to watch it.

everyone needs some medicine for their melancholy

Medicine for Melancholy is a portrait of San Francisco that highlights all sorts of socioeconomic and racial tensions embodied by a short-lived love story between a boy and a girl. Micah (Wyatt Cenac) is a fairly one-dimensional person that was born and raised in the city and describes himself with one word: “black.” Joanne (Tracey Heggins) is an African American woman that identifies with the yuppie and indie subcultures; she prints screen tees, lives with her white boyfriend in the Marina, and is in the middle of a quarter life crisis. After they sleep together at a party, it’s seemingly unclear why Micah is so eager to get to know her. Maybe he wants her to get back to her roots, educate her about their shared culture, or turn her away from what in his view is her desire to assimilate into white culture. Even more bewildering is her subsequent acquiescence to his persistence as she eventually takes a liking to him and allows him to share the day with her.

In the end, despite the density of the city, it becomes obvious that everyone is just lonely and broken. He is trying to mend his broken heart as he lives in a city that he both loves and hates. She might feel trapped in the silk coffin of her unfulfilling relationship as she strives to find herself yet is unable to break free and become financially independent. Even though she insists that people should be perceived as individuals, perhaps she also feels a sense of guilt about not being able to identify with her cultural roots. Maybe that is why she is intrigued by and curious about him. They don’t speak a lot, but there seems to be a mutual understanding and tacit acceptance of differences. No one is judged to be better or worse by being who they are; people are merely different, and everyone feels the weight of their lifestyle choices and worldviews. The movie seems to be filmed through a beautiful dream-like filter that mutes out most colors except for some reds. The “medicine” for their mutual melancholy is a bit of escapism, the meeting of two disparate worlds, before they go back to reality.

The movie does a good job of reminding you about the nuances of society, showing the effects of urban issues like gentrification, and making you feel an immense sense of yuppie guilt. Just remember that inner city residents shop at Rainbow Grocery, sell kombucha, and take cabs everywhere too! All kidding aside, gentrification is an increasingly concerning problem that a lot of people complain about, but no one (including me) really has a good solution for. A lot of people yell it out as a hollow argument against certain issues like the San Francisco tax exemption for companies that move into the Tenderloin. Even though there are a lot of things wrong with the Tenderloin, leaving the district to “benign neglect,” as coined by Daniel Moynihan, is just not the solution. This really poignant article by Randy Shaw delineates the development and characteristics of boroughs that have been gentrified in the past.

The Uptown Tenderloin has remarkably few ownership housing units… Virtually all of the Uptown Tenderloin’s buildings substantially exceed the six-unit maximum allowed for condo conversions. And because nonprofits like TNDC seized upon vacant lots that were put up for sale, there are no large opportunity sites for large condo developments in the future. Further, no gentrified neighborhood includes, as the Uptown Tenderloin does, thousands of SRO units whose conversion or demolition is prohibited. Single rooms lacking kitchens do not attract the urban gentry, and instead provide a refuge for low-income residents priced out of neighborhoods lacking such low cost housing (San Francisco’s Chinatown also has resisted gentrification due to its many SRO’s).

Contrary to what some believe, no neighborhood in the United States has been gentrified through the gradual, voluntary departures of working class tenants and the opening up of their units to more affluent residents capable of paying higher rents. Such a process is instead a product of a neighborhood already gentrifying, which occurs through creating significant homeownership opportunities in previously rental areas, undergoing the physical transformation of the pre-gentrified space through new development, demolition or substantial upgrading of existing units, and by the absence of tenant legal protections against displacement. The Uptown Tenderloin offers an extraordinarily rare opportunity for the urban poor and working class to live in a highly desirable neighborhood without fear of gentrification. It is a community that won its hard-fought battle against gentrification, yet its residents still await many of the fruits of victory.

Perhaps Twitter and other high tech companies moving into the Tenderloin will help to clean it up and attract opportunities for small businesses establish themselves and grow, providing jobs to people who provide services that support larger players in the economy. It’s inevitable that the cost of living will go up with businesses that cater to high-income patrons opening up, and I guess no one can know what will happen, but hopefully not too many people will be displaced. A good way to supplement your income, brought to you by one of the high tech companies that is around the Uptown Tenderloin district, is to use Airbnb to rent out part of your apartment. Each month, I pretty much pay for all my rent with the money I earn from the service, and it’s also a great way to meet people! With an improved surrounding environment, perhaps the Tenderloin will also become a more desirable place to stay in for tourists, allowing residents to have a chunk of that lucrative tourism industry ;). 

when the subversive surfaces, the underground burrows deeper

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Check out this new wall by guys from the Ghetto Farceur Crew: Bims, Reso, and Paume. Video here.

Usually when you think about art, you envision a sterile museum-like environment in which everything is deliberately placed. From the spacing between the pieces, to the exact luminosity of the lighting, to the black-rimmed glasses precariously placed on the art critic’s cavalier nose bridge. Observers fabricate ideas about meaning as they sip on their wine, even though most of it is probably inscrutable to them. Graffiti is the underbelly of art, created in the shadowy shroud of nightfall: a lowbrow, almost barbaric practice that is mercilessly persecuted by governmental authorities. Urban youth use it as a form of expression, a way of making their mark, and (to a certain extent) a way to build community with other “bombers” in the area.

Nowadays, in an endless attempt to be more authentic, underground movements like street art are becoming more and more mainstream. Previously subversive artists like Banksy and Invader have become household names along with the likes of great contemporary artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Andy Warhol. When I was in Sevilla, I came across an art gallery that was prepping for a Michael Grems exhibit. The artist was carefully adjusting the lighting, “tagging” the gallery walls, and letting a stream of graffiti dry on a large ream of butcher paper. Ah, how the subversive has become sterile.

Cities like San Francisco are now also commissioning street artists to paint murals on buildings that are commonly tagged to deter vandalism. There is increasing tension between those who “sold out” and are commissioned by “the man” to create street art versus the genuinely dissident crowd. This animosity is also reflective of issues caused by the socio-economic divide and the trend of gentrification in urban areas. Now that the public has come to adopt, embrace, and defend mainstream street art, it seems that you almost need to be more crude and unpolished in style to truly be authentic and set yourself apart from the sellouts.

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This pattern of acceptance by society might force the underground to become more and more innovative in their approach and create new genres of underground art. Or it might just result in an endless cycle of turf wars and the invention of some paint deterring super shield. Going forward, it will be interesting to see how urban development and these social issues play out, but for now, we all need to take a more sympathetic approach and understand the motivations behind the so-called degenerate blight upon our pristine surfaces.