Information isn't advocacy

In your "King of Cash" (8/13/03) article you once again mistakenly refer to Zephyr Real Estate as having used "strong-arm tactics to evict tenants" and having "bragged" on flyers about how "booting tenants increases values." As the president of Zephyr Real Estate, I would like once and for all to set the record straight. Zephyr Real Estate does not own any property and has never evicted a tenant. The "flyer" to which your report refers was the Spring 2000 Zephyr Quarterly Newsletter in which an article compared the price paid for a duplex sold with a tenant to the same building which fell out of escrow and then resold after the tenant had purchased a home and voluntarily vacated the unit. We wrote that article because property owners (to whom the newsletter is sent) commonly ask real estate agents how much more a building is worth if sold vacant. Owners use the answer to this question to decide whether or not to sell their buildings when a unit becomes vacant and/or to decide at what amount a negotiated settlement with a tenant is reasonable. We did not "brag" about evictions, condone or endorse evictions for profit. We didn't do it then and we don't do it now. The article did not, in fact, deal with evictions at all; the subject was a voluntarily vacated rental.

William C. Drypolcher

San Francisco

Rachel Brahinsky and Tali Woodward respond Dryplocher is correct that the Zephyr document we quoted describes a home increasing in value after the tenants voluntarily left. It also says: "Given the Byzantine regulations surrounding owner move-in evictions in buildings of two or more units, it is no surprise that buildings which are delivered vacant sell for considerably more.... Knowing this difference in price, is it any surprise that owners will seek extreme measures to deliver a building vacant?" According to the San Francisco Tenant's Union's Ted Gullickson, Zephyr employees have been the Realtors "most consistently involved" in owner move-in evictions in San Francisco for several years.

Businesses as benefactors

In your Aug. 13 story "Newsom's Money Matrix" you tried in typical Bay Guardian fashion to smear Sup. Gavin Newsom by implying that his contributions from the real estate, construction, and hospitality businesses somehow makes him "corrupt." This is in keeping with your usual journalistic style of labeling anyone who doesn't share your philosophy as "corrupt" or "sleazy."

Not only did your story make the implication of corruption without a single fact to back it up, it was flawed because it was based on your nonsensical premise that the business community and anyone associated with it are by nature "corrupt."

It is the business community in San Francisco that creates the jobs, pays the taxes, and contributes millions of dollars each year in charitable donations to cultural and nonprofit organizations, many of which help the poor. Without these many businesses that you continuously demonize, San Francisco would be a city with a much-diminished quality of life.

Newsom recognizes the important role the business community makes in contributing to San Francisco's vitality. It's unfortunate that the Bay Guardian does not.

E.F. Sullivan

San Francisco

Our lefty paranoia

The Bay Guardian is too quick to see evil behind businesses and successful individuals who donate to Gavin Newsom. Could it be that the donors are giving to keep the city from going to hell in a lefty Socialist handbag?

Could it be that they are donating so they can keep their businesses in a city hostile to business, rather than having to leave once a "progressive" mayor is elected and makes conducting for-profit business impossible?

Your paranoid rantings about Newsom do a disservice to the political agenda you are trying to advance.

Wolfgang Schmittle
San Francisco

PG&E's P.R. trick

Thanks for your editorial "PG&E's New Big Lie" (8/13/03) regarding this polluter's alleged support for closing the Hunters Point power plant. Contrary to this PG&E public relations trick, the facts speak for themselves: PG&E has now applied to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District requesting a new five-year air-pollution permit for the outdated, unnecessary, and dirty PG&E Hunters Point power plant. Greenaction and the community will fight the PG&E permit application every step of the way, and we will continue to demand this polluting plant be shut down immediately.

We also read with amazement the letter to the editor from Ed Smeloff of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission regarding the city's plan to site four new power plants. It seems Mr. Smeloff and the city PUC have invented a new rationale for these proposed power plants, now claiming they would be used to help they city "move much more aggressively to develop solar and wind power." Mr. Smeloff seems to forget that these new plants were originally proposed to enable the city to close the PG&E Hunters Point power plant and to move away from the other existing fossil-fuel plant, the Mirant Potrero power plant.

Adding new fossil-fuel power plants, while keeping existing fossil-fuel power plants open, will increase pollution and will discourage – not encourage – solar and wind power. And that is simply an unacceptable threat to the health and well-being of our city.

Bradley Angel and Marie Harrison
Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice

For the record

In our "Best of the Bay" issue (7/30/03), the name of the Readers' Poll winner for Best Place to Buy Seafood should have been listed as Whole Foods Market, and there is only one location in San Francisco, at 1765 California St.