Downtown's backlash

THE PEOPLE WHO have been running San Francisco for most of the past half-century were hit with a major shock two years ago when a slate of district supervisorial candidates, running directly in opposition to the mayor and his pro-development policies, swept to victory. Over the past two years, the direction of San Francisco politics has been changing: voters have limited the mayor's control over the city planning process, public power is at the top of the political agenda, tenants and neighborhood groups don't have to struggle just to be heard at City Hall.

But downtown hasn't given up – in fact, as Cassi Feldman reports on page 24, there's a concerted effort to repeal the advances of the past two years, in perhaps the most insidious way possible. The city's biggest businesses, operating through the Committee on Jobs, the Chamber of Commerce, and hotel and restaurant trade groups, have mobilized behind two fall ballot initiatives that together would represent a major – and lasting – step backward for progressive, independent, and neighborhood politics. The passage of Propositions R and N would mean a fundamental shift in the way this liberal city addresses social welfare issues and, ultimately, a fundamental shift in the demographics of the city. What downtown is out to do is to drive renters and poor people – who tend to be more progressive voters – right out of town.

This isn't the first time that the Committee on Jobs has launched a strategic initiative to destroy neighborhood and community-based politics in San Francisco. In the early 1990s the group drafted a detailed plan to overhaul the City Charter, elect pro-business supervisors, and ensure, through a sophisticated media strategy and campaign contributions, that no progressive candidate could get elected mayor. The entire plan was outlined in documents the Bay Guardian obtained under the California Public Records Act (see "Hostile Takeover," 7/13/94).

Downtown won – for a while. The assault was beaten back, eventually – but not until after the brutal damage of the late 1990s, when development ran rampant and more than 10,000 San Franciscans were evicted from their homes. The key element in taking back San Francisco: the return to district elections of supervisors, which prevented downtown money from controlling the board.

This time around, the big-business forces are a bit more tricky. But the impact of their campaign could be just as brutal – and permanent. Prop. R, for example, sounds relatively innocuous: it's a measure that, according to proponents, would make it easier for renters to buy their own homes. But what the measure would really do is eliminate 85,000 rent-controlled apartments from the market, replacing them with condos or rentals that have no tenant protections at all. Thousands of "shared housing" units – flats in which several tenants live as housemates to keep costs down – would vanish quickly, making it difficult or impossible for the next generation of artists, students, working-class people, and immigrants to move to San Francisco. Instead, those units would be sold as condos to people with higher incomes – and, presumably, more conservative politics.

That's just part of the attack. Prop. N is aimed directly at driving homeless people out of town and changing the way San Francisco addresses social welfare issues. And the downtown crew is trying to defeat Proposition B, an affordable-housing measure that could provide decent, low-cost homes for as many as 30,000 San Franciscans.

Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce is helping Pacific Gas and Electric Co. try to block public power and protect its bankrupt monopoly by defeating Proposition D, and the big landlords are trying to stop Proposition L and prevent the city from gaining back $30 million in revenue it lost after a lawsuit by big businesses.

The money behind these efforts is phenomenal, reaching into the millions of dollars. There's no way the progressive/independent/neighborhood activists can come close to matching it. But the concerted downtown juggernaut has sparked an encouraging alliance between labor, tenants, public power activists, environmentalists, social service providers, and others who want to keep this a diverse, tolerant, and progressive city. The campaigns against Props. R and N and for Props. B, D, and L are working together, along with some of the supervisorial campaigns, on joint campaigns – and only if they effectively pool limited resources to help the broader agenda can downtown be decisively stopped in November.