Not homeless enough for the city with hearts

 

Today families, teachers, children, and friends organized through the activist group Faith in Action rallied outside Cesar Chavez School to highlight how San Francisco city policies are failing students like Samara. 

Samara is a 7-year-old girl with complex medical conditions, who has spent the last 2 years living in homeless shelters with her family. She’s had multiple surgeries over the past month and is getting ready to leave the hospital soon. But according to the City, Samara and her family do not qualify for any housing assistance because a computer says they do not have enough points and therefore they are not “homeless enough”.

 

The families described their predicament. Where are they supposed to go if turned down by a city computer?

... safe, decent homes, and the dignity of our families cannot be determined by points on a computer. 

San Franciscans are urged to call the mayor -- this is no way to run a city that prides itself on its heart.

From the streets of San Francisco

Reporter Heather Knight, along with photographer Loren Elliot, offers a largely sympathetic account [gift article] of some of what the city of San Francisco is doing to care for asylum seeking families who turn up in our midst. 

They huddled in the cold on a graffiti-covered bench last November, the twin girls dozing in their parents’ laps while the older children buried their heads in their phones.

Most nights, the family of six waited like this outside a San Francisco school gymnasium until it could be converted into a homeless shelter. Once inside, they slept each night on a small patch of the floor, then rose early each morning to secure a spot in one of the three showers shared by 69 people. They had to leave by sunrise so the school gym could be returned to its intended purpose.

Margarita Solito, 36, sometimes wondered if the 3,200-mile journey to San Francisco from El Salvador had been worth it. The family left as international migrants, and now they were migrants of a different sort, moving around their new city all day with nowhere to call home.

A year after arriving in the city, Ms. Solito’s fight for housing would pay off, and her family would be able to put down roots. But their journey shed light on the larger crisis of family homelessness in San Francisco and revealed the daily uncertainty that hundreds of schoolchildren face there. ...

Knight reports that 2403 children in the San Francisco Unified School District, 5 percent of total enrollment, are unhoused!

No wonder teachers and school staff wanted to use what space they could find in their building to shelter the children they serve. Neighborhood meetings averted most fears about using the Buena Vista/Horace Mann campus for this purpose. I live nearby; the nightly shelter residents have not discernibly upset the area.

San Francisco is relatively friendly to this work thanks to the tireless agitation of community and migrant groups. 

Today Bay Area Faith in Action rallied outside of the public San Francisco General Hospital in support of another resident of this shelter, Carmen Marquez, who contracted meningitis, spent 6 days in a coma, and then had to have 9 fingers and her lower leg amputated due to the disease. 

The City Department of Homelessness wants to send her and her teenage daughter back to a shelter. They say that despite her medical condition, she does not have enough points in the computer system to qualify for more permanent housing.

If wealthy San Francisco remains at all friendly to our poor neighbors, it's because of tireless agitation from organized people in community groups.

Where's the housing?

I suppose I might have expected this if I'd thought about it, but this picture draws attention to the reality that "subsidized housing" -- living spaces built, owned, and/or sometimes managed outside the real estate economy -- is mostly a feature of older states in the northeast, with a pocket in the poorest states of the deep south. In the original graphic, you can click on each state and see the number of units per thousand people.

Rhode Island had the most subsidized housing units of any US state in 2022, with over 35 units per 1,000 people. Arizona had the least, with fewer than six units per 1,000 people. These figures represent all housing under contract for federal subsidy, occupied and unoccupied units.

The need for subsidized housing often outweighs the number of units available, meaning applicants can wait years to be approved. ...

... Between 2004 and 2022, the number of units under federal contract as subsidized housing, both occupied and unoccupied, decreased by about 11% nationally. In 2004, there were 17.3 units per 1,000 people; in 2022, there were 15.4.

It's hard to avoid concluding that where there has been decreased supply, there may be greater homelessness. On the other hand, having been inside plenty of public housing in my time, I'm aware that the government is often a lousy landlord -- as are the private firms that governments contract with for management.

California conundrum

Yesterday I walked a lovely stretch of ocean coast in the beach town of Pacifica. I wasn't surprised to encounter this sign which has a bone to pick with local government. Pacificans are very participatory people.

Here's a cropped image which should be legible:

No, I didn't know. And some elementary googling didn't much enlighten me. Among other mysteries, the next Pacifica Council meeting seems to be scheduled for June 6, not the 5th.

But I did find some information about the town's responses to state mandates that it build more housing. As everyone knows, more people want to live in California than there is housing to accommodate, driving prices and homelessness sky high. For years, the state government has defined what is obscurely named a "Housing Element," which prescribes how many new dwellings communities should be building. Most municipalities have ignored this, without consequence in the past. But the state is trying to get tough as the affordability crisis deepens.

Nearly a year ago, the Pacifica Tribune offered this summation:

As the housing shortage has become more acute, the state has significantly increased its demands for new housing. In the eight-year RHNA cycle that expires this year, Pacifica was expected to produce 413 units of new housing. In the next cycle, 2023-2031, that number jumps to 1,892.

With the increased expectations comes more enforcement from the state. “We never met the numbers before, and nothing happened,” said Pacifica Mayor Mary Bier. Now, she says, the city could lose its permitting and zoning authority. And the city could face financial penalties and legal actions.

“It’s not like we have to immediately build 1,892 units or else,” she said, “but we have to create opportunities for the development to happen” by opening up zoning and making other changes to the Housing Element section of the General Plan.

Because of these changes, “developers have more leverage now, and people who will listen,” says Pete Shoemaker, a local environmentalist and a member of the Tribune’s Editorial Advisory Committee. “Some of these proposals are spitballs. They’re throwing out ideas to see what sticks,” he said. But some are more serious.

While a high-density, affordable-income project on land already surrounded by development might be the most efficient and environmentally friendly way for the city to increase its housing stock, it’s not going to be the most profitable to a developer, said Shoemaker. ...

Will this pleasant coastal open space disappear under a development? Time and politics will tell. The town has an honorable record of preserving stretches of coast, but it also needs housing ...

Where you gonna lay your head?

Last summer while working in Reno to re-elect a Democratic U.S. Senator, Erudite Partner and I found ourselves having to learn a lot about housing. 

For me, that meant scrambling for places for incoming canvassers, something that you might think would be easy in a tourist town still trying to find its feet after the pandemic. It was not easy. We ended up with a shifting variety of solutions: extended stay hotels (heavily booked), short term corporate apartment rentals (pricey and some of them just plain weird), and finally, rooms at a run-down but unionized casino. 

Kasa Archiv where some of us ended up living...definitely weird.

For the E.P., learning about housing was a matter of equipping our hard working canvassers to talk about an issue they quickly discovered mattered desperately to many of the infrequent, low income voters they were meeting at the doors. Yes, people cared about abortion rights and keeping crazies out of government (and gas prices which pushed them away from us), but whether they would be able to keep a place to live that they could afford was often their main issue. 

Reno had seem an influx from California during the pandemic; it is growing a tech-industrial economy that displaces the old time Nevadans. It was a frequent experience for our canvassers to knock on a door, only to learn that the voter had been evicted. Sometimes the address no longer existed, torn down to make way for expensive future condos. 

To the credit of the Culinary/UniteHERE in Nevada, the union has taken on Nevada's housing squeeze, using its hard-won political clout to lobby for rent controls and other fixes. What good is a union contract if the worker can't afford to live where their job is located?

2022 was not a good time to be a renter in Reno. E.P. has taken the lessons of Nevada nationwide in her new essay for the syndicator, Tom Englehart: Don't Try to Find a Home in Washington, D.C. Or Pretty Much Anywhere Else If You're a Renter. 

E.P. asserts there exist a menu of policy solutions that should help:

There is no single solution to the growing problem of unaffordable housing, but with political will and organizing action at the local, state, and federal levels it could be dealt with.

 Read all about it.

San Franciscans: Vote Yes on Prop M

 

This is a common sense measure that might help the housing affordability crisis in our city, at least a little. Houses and apartments should be places to live, not a chips in a financial game. The city should make it costly for landlords to hold livable units off the market. I don't know whether this will work, but it might help.

California housing supply morass: a local view

Amid the cacophony created by California's recall election and the threat from the Delta bug, this year's legislative session has spit out, and the governor signed, bills meant to increase creation of new housing. Housing policy is almost impenetrably complicated and the actual impact of various tweaks may or may not be as anticipated or accomplish intended goals. But nobody can argue we don't have a problem and that government ought not be trying to do something.

Here's columnist George Skelton explaining the state's housing problem in the Los Angeles Times: 

We need to cozy up in the larger cities near jobs and public transportation. That means filling in vacant lots with housing, making more efficient use of residential land and building higher rather than sideways into far-off suburbia, where long commutes play havoc with family life and emit greenhouse gases that accelerate climate change. 

But mainly, we’ve got to do something about the economics of supply and demand that are turning the California dream into a nightmare for millions. There’s a dearth of supply and unquenchable demand. We need to add 1.8 million to 2.5 million new homes by 2025, and we’re crawling along at maybe 100,000 per year. 

The median price of a single-family California home in August was about $828,000, compared with the national median of roughly $360,000 in July. In Los Angeles, it was $825,000 in July — in the San Francisco Bay Area, $1.3 million.

... “Local government has less control under these bills,” says Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a former leader of the state Senate. As a legislator, Steinberg pushed through some of the earliest legislation that attempted to incentivize more urban housing near public transportation.

“I’ve been on both sides. My view has not changed. Local control is an important value, but it’s not absolute. It’s not more important than the desperate need in this state to produce more housing.”

Cautiously, I'm with Skelton and Steinberg. My generation must not foreclose the possibility of younger people thriving in the place we love. We have to find a way to get more housing built, particularly at the affordable end of the spectrum. If down zoning helps, so be it.

That said, I have lived in a neighborhood, San Francisco's Mission, which has experienced itself as undergoing gentrification for as long as I've been here -- nearly 50 years! When I came, I was part of that, intruding on a place that had been working class Irish-American on its way to becoming working class Latinx. The "white hippies" landed here because it was cheap -- and we felt we belonged because we loved the local cultural stew alongside our neighbors. And some of us are still here.

But when a certain kind of housing policy advocate screams for more urban density, they seem routinely oblivious to the fact that somehow the new housing almost always gets built to the detriment of existing housing, of existing communities, usually poor and of color. The vision of more density everywhere is nice -- but controversial development will always be crammed into communities which have the least power to exert local control. Anyone who doubts that should look at the Fillmore-Western Addition San Francisco neighborhoods where a thriving urban Black community was bulldozed to be replaced by antiseptic highrises and some public housing. Of course we distrust.

Jerusalem Demas at Vox is a policy journalist who aligns with advocates for greater density. But she takes seriously what gentrification does to neighborhoods. 

None of this is to undermine the very real cultural conflict that gentrification brings. Even if you’re able to stay in your neighborhood and your home, watching store after store pop up that doesn’t serve your community or isn’t available to you at your income level can be deeply alienating. It’s no wonder that people who have faced centuries of disinvestment grow angry as public and private money flows into their neighborhoods only after high-income, college-educated people choose to move there. Even if those people are not wholly responsible for the inequality, the blatant injustice is hard to ignore. 

Taken all together, it becomes clear why we focus on gentrification while the unseen culprits (segregated enclaves) are able to avoid controversy: Gentrification is the most visual manifestation of inequality in urban life. 

Or, it's the racism and economic exploitation, stupid!

• • •

Meanwhile, let's celebrate when new, well-designed, dense housing is available to some who need it. Walking during the pandemic, I watched with curiosity as the new structure in the former light-industrial neighborhood on Folsom Street seemed to fly up. Casa Adelante opened to residents in July. Erected after a ten year development and funding process, the new Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) building provides 127 "permanently affordable" units for low income residents. 

The obstacle strewn process that hamstrings creating buildings like this one is what needs to be blown up -- along with some local restrictive density limits that have advantaged single family homeowners.

City struggles

As a Mission resident, I tend to assume that land use fights are about gentrification. The paradigm: some developer has acquired a buildable bit of the neighborhood and wants to erect something that will drive out existing impoverished residents and replace them with folks with more money. Despite the recognized reality that San Francisco needs more housing, communities band together and squaw, sometimes winning mitigation payments.

But while Walking San Francisco today, I came across lots of evidence of another sort of San Francisco land use kerfuffle out in the West Portal neighborhood.

These signs dotted a several block area. People care.

I have not been able to find what I would call unbiased discussions of the proposed project -- though just reading the proposal as described to the building department seems pretty horrifying. Apparently the builder wants to put five large single family houses on a nearly vertical hillside. 

The signs throw the kitchen sink of objections at the project. There's a whiff of injured expectations of privilege about them.

However, an op-ed in the local Examiner -- an almost newspaper -- by a neighborhood activist presents a convincing story of previous efforts to build on this particular hillside leading to mudslides and broken foundations. 

People who live across the street from the five proposed homes are terrified that a large rainstorm during construction — or even just the construction itself — will result in the mountain coming down on top of them.

It’s happened before.

In the 1970s, damage from an earlier landslide and the continuing threat of more rockfalls temporarily closed a church at the base of Edgehill. In 1982, another slide forced a preschool to move. In 1995, rocks fell on a site at the base of the mountain where 13 homes were being built by developer William Spiers on Knockash Hill Court. Engineers inspected the site, declared it safe, and construction continued.

In January 1997, however, after a torrential rainstorm, the hillside above Knockash Hill Court gave way, and 100 tons of boulders, mud and debris overran a 10-foot-tall retaining wall and slammed into the new homes below. ...

I might join the opposition knowing that history. 

On the other hand, as a general matter, it galls me that this builder wants to put in single family homes. What the city needs is more four-plexes and small apartment buildings. And this West Side neighborhood isn't doing its share. That omission keeps my neighborhood on a war footing against gentrification.

Can't we do better than this?

On a walk with a parent in 1940, a curious small child looked at this scene and asked: "What's that?"

"Oh, that's some Boy Scouts with a thing they call a pup tent."

On a walk with a parent in 1990, a curious child looked at this scene and asked: "What's that?"

"That's a back packing tent. When you get bigger, we'll do that one day."

On a walk with a parent in 2020, a curious child looked at this scene and asked: "What's that?"

"Oh, that's a tent. That's where some people who don't have houses sleep. Unless they aren't lucky enough to have a tent. Then they sleep in the doorways."

I'm out most mornings at dawn, running in the Mission District streets. It's not like what I hear the Tenderloin looks like -- so many tents that the sidewalks are impassable to walkers. But many blocks, including the one I live on, host at least one tent. The one pictured is half a block from the police department; don't know if that makes for a danger to its occupants or provides a kind of security. All along Valencia Street, people huddle under blankets in doorways.

Can't we do better than this?

A tale of two turfs

San Francisco continues its foot-dragging failure to improve conditions for its unhoused tent residents crowding the Civic Center and Tenderloin neighborhoods. Mission Local reports:

Although the Tenderloin plan calls for safe sleeping sites “in and outside of the Tenderloin” it did not list any specific locations, but it listed Tenderloin parking lots, sidewalks, and blocked off streets as possible safe sleeping sites.

[Pratibha] Tekkey, the director of community organizing at the Central City SRO Collaborative, said the parking lots listed in the plan, such as the vacant lots at 180 Jones and on Hyde and Turk, are “extremely small” and can only have up to 15 tents to be able to follow social distancing protocols.

“It doesn’t make sense to have 10 tents in each parking lot,” she said. “You’re still not changing what the problem is.”

That is, hundreds of homeless people in a dense neighborhood alongside 25,000 housed residents who also do not feel safe leaving their homes and going to essential businesses during the pandemic, Tekkey said.

Meanwhile in the far southeast of the city, there's this:

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

According to a San Francisco Examiner account, Bayview neighborhood non-profits got tired of waiting for action from the city.

Bayview homeless advocates and nonprofits have set up a tent encampment at Bayview Park in reaction to The City’s slow action to find shelter for the neighborhood’s unhoused residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Community organizers from the United Council of Human Services, also known as Mother Brown’s, and Beds 4 Bayview, established the camp in the park near the closed Martin Luther King Jr. pool with 40 tents arranged to allow for social distancing. Encampment residents have access to restroom facilities on site, and are being supplied with water, food, security and other services by the organizations.

It looked like a big improvement on city center conditions or even the doorways on Valencia Street to me. Though of course unhoused people are just as much attached to their accustomed neighborhoods as the rest of us ...

Direct action: homes for homeless Angelenos

“With this health crisis and this housing crisis, we need every vacant house to be a home for those who don’t have a safe and stable place to sleep in,” said Ruby Gordillo, 33, while standing on the porch of a two-bedroom bungalow before moving in with her three children.

Gordillo and others involved in the protest have said they were inspired by a group of homeless mothers in Oakland. Late last year, those mothers took over a vacant, corporate-owned property and, after they were evicted, secured backing from Gov. Gavin Newsom to force the Bay Area property’s sale to a community land trust.

Like the Oakland moms, the protesters in El Sereno are affiliated with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, an organization that has advocated several statewide measures to expand rent control and tenant protections.

Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2020

Brave ... and desparate.

Available space for housing?

Church properties with parking lots are rare in this crowded city, but our state senator is promoting a plan to put those spaces to better use. Since I usually beat up on Scott Wiener for situating his drive for our needed increased housing density in plans that increase gentrification while benefiting rich developers, I should give him credit when he does something better.

Now Wiener is pushing to make it easier for religious institutions to build housing people can afford on their property.

Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced a measure Thursday to remove local zoning restrictions for residential development by churches, synagogues, mosques and other faith organizations, as well as nonprofit hospitals.

SB899 would permit them to build apartments and condominiums that are entirely affordable to low-income residents without having to ask officials to rezone their land for multifamily housing.

Projects in residential neighborhoods could be up to three stories tall and include as many as 40 units. In mixed-use and commercial areas, they could be five stories tall with 150 units. Developers would have to agree to keep the housing affordable to low-income renters for at least 55 years and to low-income buyers for at least 45 years.

San Francisco Chronicle

That might actually help a little.

Kicking 'em when they are down ...

Los Angeles Times writer John Myers reports:

There are few policy topics with which Gov. Gavin Newsom has more familiarity than homelessness. ...

During a stemwinder of a news conference on Friday rolling out his proposed state budget, Newsom scoffed at those who wondered about his broken campaign promise to appoint someone to lead his administration’s anti-homelessness effort.

“You want to know who’s the homeless czar?” Newsom asked reporters. “I’m the homeless czar in the state of California.”

People in Newsom's old home town might not react happily to that. His "Care Not Cash" policies as mayor certainly made people without places to live more miserable, but didn't do anything to reduce the number of people living on the streets. Far from it.

The unhoused need houses, but all ours are going to winners in a grossly unequal economy. That poorly distributed boom gives Gov. Gavin a big budget to play with. And the population of people without houses grows.

Still true:

Housing scarcity is about theft from lower wage workers

The Times published this as part of its ongoing campaign to shame the San Francisco area into building more housing at higher density. Guess what? They are right. We need a lot more affordable housing.

But what ought to be equally obvious is that this illustrates that the distribution of goodies in the tech economy is out of whack. That guy in the suit is simply taking too much of the pie. (Note they make him a lawyer who presumably adds some recognizable value to the ecosystem rather than a tech bro peddling his latest brain fart.) As long as society requires janitors and gardeners and bus drivers and nurses and teachers ... the capitalist bargain has been that the winners would pay them enough to live. Not to live like the high flyers, but to live.

If you are going build an economy where new millionaires are minted every minute, you are going to have to pay the support staff enough to participate, at some level, in the necessities of life. Companies won't like that, but it is the cost of soaring entrepreneurial opportunity.

Solving the housing shortage in the Bay has to include redistributing some of the new wealth among a broader community. That should be obvious, but the chorus of critics routinely skip that part of the equation.

It's not density that city people hate; it's housing injustice

The national media is full of stories about how coastal California needs more houses, but -- for reasons pundits treat as either cupidity or stupidity -- we resist efforts to build what we obviously need. The collapse last week of this year's attempt to pass state Senator Scott Wiener's bill set off another predictable round. SB 50's essence was to allow more building near public transit lines, though there were plenty of devilish details. This, from the NY Times, is a representative specimen, irrefutable on big picture analysis, uninformed on the nitty-gritty level where politics plays out:

Over the past eight years, the San Francisco Bay Area has added about 676,000 jobs and 176,000 housing units. The entirely predictable result has been a surge in rents and home prices along with a rising homeless problem that has jetloads of tourists convinced that one of the richest places on earth is actually a dystopia of misery and destitution. Despite its reputation for all things liberal, California has the highest poverty rate in the country — about one in five people — once the cost of shelter is figured in. This is not for lack of jobs or money, but because its cities are so exclusive that they are essentially turning working-class residents into poor people.

... S.B. 50, an ambitious but divisive bill, was shelved until next year. The bill would expand the state’s housing supply by forcing cities to allow apartment buildings in the low-slung bungalow neighborhoods on which the state was built. ...

Each year state legislators go through a Groundhog Day routine in which they introduce dozens of new housing bills that are full of technicalities and minutiae but fall into two basic categories. The first are bills that make it easier to build housing so that the long-term shortage can be rectified. The second are bills that provide more money for subsidized affordable housing and expand tenant protections so that people who already have affordable homes don’t lose them. ...Where does it go? All we can count on for now is that next year will feature a renewed fight over S.B. 50. And dozens of other housing bills. And the housing problem getting worse.

Like a lot of San Franciscans, I'm thoroughly convinced that we need more housing and that means more density. I'd go to bat for a believable plan. Yet I am not at all on board for Wiener's bill; in fact it looks like a con job to me.

• The bill's assumptions about developer behavior are nonsense in the San Francisco context. Roll back local controls and you will merely allow more condos for rich people . Even the Times has figured that out.

  As land costs rise, developers can make more money building at the top end of the market and ignoring the middle.

• Housing developers have to be required to build affordable units, probably at something close to a 50/50 ratio of rich to middle class housing to keep new buildings from just making the situation worse.

• If the state legislature is going to weigh in on urban housing and density, they need to get their feet off city's necks and repeal pre-emption measures that effectively outlaw effective rent control (Costa-Hawkins) and incentivize clearing existing apartment buildings of renters to sell them off as condos (Ellis). They also need to offer more money for public transit if they are going to dump more people into existing systems.

• It's hard to take seriously a commitment to equity when suburbs are incentivized not to develop public transit because to do so would mean they had to house more people.

• It's hard to take seriously a law that's been written to let Marin County off the hook for its density provisions. Look, I love all the green spaces over there, but Marin is the 13th richest county in the country according to the American Community Survey. It could do more to house more people.

• If some sort of grand bargain between localities and the state is going to happen, it probably needs a more trusted broker than Senator Wiener. He's my rep; he's been kicking around San Francisco politics for over a decade -- and he's never seemed to meet a private builder development project that he didn't like.

Tim Redmond who has been observing these housing fights for decades laid out at 48 Hills what it might take to break the logjam on increasing density in the San Francisco Bay Area.

... Imagine the billions of dollars that will pour into the state coffers with the next round of [tech] IPOs. Why isn’t Wiener asking that all of that money go to stabilize and protect existing vulnerable communities – including the construction of a vast amount of (sure, dense) affordable housing, served by new, state-funded transit?

The [San Francisco Board of Supervisors] are asking the right questions. I doubt Wiener would accept the type of amendments that would make his bill acceptable – and if he did, I doubt the Legislature, which is under the thumb of the real-estate industry, would accept them.

For anyone who has read this far: why am I writing this? Housing policy is not one of my regular topics. But irritation with the smug superiority with which national media approach our devastating housing situation has me thoroughly pissed off. If you want to hear from people who work in this arena everyday, let me suggest San Francisco's Housing Rights Committee.

Yes on San Francisco's Prop. C

Working in Reno on one little piece of the most important election in recent US history (1858 comes to mind as comparable, but not many others) is likely to prevent me from writing daily blog posts here until after November 6.

San Franciscans have a chance to reduce the frequency of scenes like this. But will we rise to the chance?

Heather Knight writing in the SF Chron offers an insight into the opposition to a small tax on rich businesses to provide better services to people living on our streets:

Campaign finance disclosures show contributions to the No on C campaign from Stripe ($419,999); Visa ($225,000); Paul Graham, an investor in Y-Combinator ($150,000); Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey ($125,000); Lyft ($100,000); brokerage founder Charles Schwab ($100,000); venture capitalist Michael Moritz ($100,000); the Hotel Council ($50,000) and the Committee on Jobs ($30,000).

Yes, in one of the cities with the biggest income inequality gap in the world — where a household has to earn $300,000 a year to buy a median-priced home — CEOs are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to prevent their companies from paying a small amount to house homeless people.

Not all out tech overlords are so small minded; one of the wonders of this San Francisco moment is that Marc Benioff of Salesforce has put his money behind a more humane vision for the city where his building looms. San Franciscans can show their vision of our future by voting YES on C.

H/t to Erudite Partner for the photo.

On affordable housing

Yesterday turned out to be a day for me to think about housing. As most observers and all residents of the Bay Area know, we've got too much money, primarily from the tech economy, chasing too little housing. This is an atractive place to live if you've got money and folks just keep on coming. The consequence is that many (even most) low- and many middle-income people are under threat of being forced out of their homes and will not be able to find affordable alternatives.

Three vignettes from my day:

Subsidized housing: I spent the morning with a disabled friend who is one of the lucky ones. For two decades, she's lived in a rent-subsidized apartment in a building managed by a non-profit. Because she'd been hospitalized last year, the non-profit had never completed the HUD paper work that certifies her eligibility for 2017 or for this year. It's absence was a crisis. She's healthier now, so we sat with a social worker while she slogged through it. Beyond establishing that she still can't work and lives on Social Security, the paper work consisted of a reams of forms to sign asserting she'd been told she had various rights that she most likely would never dare assert. She was in a cooperative frame of mind -- and has no choice -- so she signed and helped the agency clean up its work product. The social worker wanted to help my friend, but she too lives within a paper maze with an eye over her shoulder toward an unsympathetic housing bureaucracy in Washington. Nobody gets to keep their dignity -- but my friend still has her apartment!

Cities and contemporary urbanism: The environmental/sustainability writer whose work I most appreciate is David Roberts at Vox. I spent part of the afternoon reading and pondering three articles he's recently written from interviews with urbanist Brent Toderian who led city planning for Vancouver, BC (a very pleasant city from what I've seen of it). If you care about how we can have more sustainable, livable cities, you might like these articles:

• Walkable urban areas can become playgrounds for the rich. Is there any way to prevent that?

• Dense urbanism is great for downtowns. But what about suburbs?

• Making cities more dense always sparks resistance. Here’s how to overcome it.

I can't say that I'm completely convinced by "new urbanism"; the lived reality of a changing city feels messier and far less just than planners seem willing to contemplate. But thinking is happening here.

Upzoning and equity: An organization that calls itself YAH! (Yes to Affordable Housing -- they are going to have to work on that name unless they have a hell of a marketing budget) sponsored a panel of progressive housing policy wonks in the evening. YAH! -- and its panelists -- think better city and regional policies really can improve equitable provision of home places for individuals and communities. YAH!'s statement of organizational aspirations is impressive. They've come up with a list I can live with.

Video of event is here.

Nothing is going to happen without citizen pressure; the power of rapacious wealth drives cities in less humane directions. But you start by getting some people up to speed, thinking, and talking about solutions -- enough little meetings can have big impacts. If people who care about affordable housing organize ... who knows. There's the energy of necessity in this movement.

For the record: episodes in game of "Hate the Homeless"

For decades, San Francisco has been a city without enough affordable housing for its low income residents. Too much money has been chasing too little supply since the 1980s, a crisis only made more drastic by our current tech prosperity.

But hey, we're liberals here! We like to feel good about ourselves.

But hey, we also don't want to step over the people and their belongings that end up on city streets.

Smart politicians exploit our ambivalence by initiating round after round of "Hate the Homeless" in which we get to complain about how unhoused people damage the city we are so proud of -- and often to vote to make these people disappear, magically -- without providing the expensive and difficult solution they need: affordable housing.

Acting Mayor Farrell is running another round of "Hate the Homeless," probably as a trial balloon for a run in 2019 against whoever is elected mayor on this upcoming June 5.

So let's look at the record:

• In November 1992, we passed a law aiming to outlaw "aggressive panhandling" -- though courts said people retained a free speech right to beg.

• In 1999, the Chronicle reported:

  Destitute once again made a target as election nears

• In 2002, the Chron trumpeted:

  Newsom begging bill ready

• In 2003, a rare outbreak of realism, then-State Senator John Burton called out the home truth:

  "What bothers me is that politicians and political consultants are going after the poor for political gain," Burton said. "I just find it offensive. Last I checked, it's not a crime to be poor."

• On April Fools day in 2005, Mayor Newsom was saying

  "Homeless woes can be solved."

• In 2006, a downtown mall opened.

  Police say they've been told to roust homeless.

• In 2007, the city made its enforcement priorities explicit:

  SoMa patrols to shepherd homeless away from tourist areas

• In 2009, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty spoke up.

  S.F. called one of toughest cities on homeless

• And so, by December 2009, we were told:

  'Sit/lie' law needed to stop bullies on Haight.

  Naturally, we passed a (redundant and seldom enforced) law to outlaw sitting on sidewalks.

• In 2016, Supervisors Mark Farrell and now-State Senator Scott Weiner set up another round of the game, sponsoring ballot measures to criminalize tents on streets and encouraging the cops to prioritize "quality of life" offenses.

  In that November, we dutifully passed Measures Q and R -- although neither added any legal or practical heft to the city's response to homelessness. But hey, we'd done something!

It's probably only fair to San Francisco to mention that twice in the last thirty years we've rejected "Hate the Homeless" measures at the ballot box -- each time because civic leaders thought that impressing us with their compassionate liberalism was more advantageous than punching down on the already beaten down.

We can do better. Unhoused people demand of us who live inside that we do better; they have every moral authority to condemn us. We need political leadership that isn't playing games. Based on past history and likely electoral outcomes, we can't expect anything from a Governor Newsom; he's been one of Hate the Homeless' more enthusiastic promoters. But local mayoral aspirants should be pressed on their housing policies. That doesn't stop after we select the next one. It took decades for the city's human crisis to become as bad as it is and it will take time to dig out of the mess the more fortunate among us have imposed on the unfortunate.