October 16, 2002

The Board of Supervisors has enacted policies in the name of "affordable housing" but ignored the calls for the creation of more workforce and market rate housing.... The decay of confidence in these supervisors has yielded new allies for the middle class – the business community.

Nathan Nayman, executive director of the Committee on Jobs, San Francisco Examiner, 9/6/02

NATHAN NAYMAN HAS been on a mission since 2000. He has a consistent message: business will never recover its political influence in San Francisco as long as the current population continues to live and vote here. That's why he is for more "market rate" and "workforce" housing and attacks "affordable housing." He knows: who works here, who lives here, votes here.

I first heard Nayman make this argument in late 2000, when he and I debated Proposition L, the community planning initiative aimed at stopping the worst excesses of the dot-com boom. Nayman claimed that Prop. L was "fascist" because it would (in his view) keep out of San Francisco the workforce for the new economy, and instead preserve "non-viable neighborhoods" – and, by direct implication, the people who live in them.

The motivating force behind Nayman's message stems from the wave of popular victories in the 2000 election, which saw the biggest power shift in postwar San Francisco. Energized by the 140,000 votes for Prop. L, an entirely new set of supervisors was elected to carry out Prop. L's agenda of balanced development, community planning, and affordable housing. Over the last 18 months, most of that agenda has been accomplished – to the dismay of the corporatist faction. Community planning is underway in the Mission District, South of Market, and Potrero Hill, which collectively were the ground zero of the "new economy." Planning loopholes, through which millions of square feet of high-tech offices were approved without affordable-housing payments, are getting plugged. The district supervisors have repealed the "live-work" loft scam and passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance, which requires all market-rate developers to set aside 10 percent of their developments for affordable housing. But Nayman and his allies don't like the way we and a majority of the district-elected Board of Supervisors have voted in the past two years. They want us out of here.

George Evankovitch, the old lefty head of the Laborers' International Union in San Francisco, liked to say that the primary difference between the Republican and the Democratic Parties was that in tough economic times, Democrats moved money around while Republicans moved people around.

Moving people around is exactly what Nayman and his allies are all about. And they have an electoral agenda to accomplish it. Left-progressive forces seem less focused on the local ballot this November, and if this woolly-headedness prevails, a strategic loss will occur that will render the past two years of left-progressive electoral advances meaningless.

What Nayman and his allies have done to make their message real is to use the November 2002 election, in particular three campaigns – No on B (the affordable-housing bond), Yes on N (Sup. Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash), and Yes on R (Home Ownership Program for Everyone) – that would begin to shift the city's demographics.

Prop. R would effectively remove the annual limit on condo conversions of existing apartments, with the primary target being rent-controlled apartments. Nayman and his allies, who have poured over $110,000 into the Yes on R campaign, claim that such an amendment will help the "middle class" become homeowners. What he fails to point out is that both the annual limit on condo conversions and rent control were policies adopted at the insistence of the middle class in order to protect them from the first great wave of gentrification in the mid 1970s during the high-rise office boom.

The only assistance Prop. R will give to the vast majority of "middle class" tenants living in a rent-controlled apartment is assistance moving away from that apartment when it's sold out from under them. Of the 145,000 rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco, only about 40,000 are occupied by households with incomes sufficient to afford a conventionally financed purchase of their apartment, and since Prop. R contains no financial assistance to tenants to buy their apartments, the other 105,000 households – 215,000 or so San Franciscans – can look forward to immediate evictions or uncontrolled rent increases leading to an eventual eviction.

Proposition N will remove only 2,000 or 3,000 poor folks from the city – but its victory will, downtown hopes, strongly advance the chances of Newsom for mayor in 2003.

But an additional and more serious function of Proposition N is the attempt to shape the debate on all social services in San Francisco – and force Newsom and any other "serious" candidate for mayor into a set of policies that will transform the way the city delivers all social services.

At its core Prop. N seeks to change the relationship between the city and its poor from one based on mutual benefit and shared civic citizenship to one of "tough love": either do what we say or take the highway. The victory of Prop. N will shift public social service policy to one based on a relationship in which continued residence in this city, now assumed to be a right of all, is made conditional for the poor.

Just as Prop. R is not really about homeownership, Prop. N is really not about a solution to homelessness. It's about changing the relationship of the city to its poor people, making it more likely they will just leave. Like Prop. R, Prop. N is really about moving people around, and out of San Francisco.

The opposition to Proposition B, the $250 million affordable-housing bond, is more open in its intent. In July a group of people from the San Francisco Organizing Project who live in District Four met with Sup. Leland Yee, who had cast one of the board's two votes against the bond. The shocked SFOPers reported that Yee told them he could not support the bond because there were already too many lower-income tenants in San Francisco, and that Prop. B would only allow more. More homeowners were needed, Yee told them, because homeowners vote more moderately than do low-income tenants.

Despite what you read in the San Francisco Examiner, opposition to Prop. B is not based upon the allegation that too little affordable housing will be built if it passes but that too much will be built, allowing too many of the "wrong" San Franciscans to stay and vote here. It will, after all, move money around, not people – the exact opposite of Nayman and his allies' agenda for this November.

Left-progressive voters, underwhelmed by Gray Davis at the top of the November ticket and demoralized by George W. Bush and the vapidness of the national Democrats, may well sit the election out, failing to realize that some critically important local measures are tucked at the bottom of the ballot. But make no mistake: all of the victories of the last few years, earned by the hard work of community-based activists, are on the line this November. Vote early and often.