Ross and I had a nice 90-minute talk yesterday. Thus far, the Board's leadership discussion has not been a nasty fight. With that said, public posts like this one don't help matters.

My goal since Election Day has been to work to get the Board Presidency into the hands of a progressive. It is not true that I want "anybody" other than Ross.

That goal should be shared by us all.

Good, Chris, I'm glad you're talking. You and Ross have to work together and lead by example.

boys,

You already fucked everything up. It's just a matter of 50 days or so before Campos or Chiu or both swing the Board to a Dufty presidency. Timid, you used all your power to drag not one, but two Trojan horses inside the walls of Fortress Progressive (Chiu and Campos). Chris, you killed your only chance of a Progressive Board presidency when you backed Quezada and told everyone not to vote for Sanchez as a second choice. You'll reap what you sow.

But, I've known you both long enough to know what you'll never admit. You'll, neither one of you, ever admit that you were wrong about these guys. Even when they cast the votes against, first, any Progressive for Board prez and then, for years on end, against Progressive legislation. You're a pair of well meaning chumps.

h.

and,

Forget the Board presidency. That's history because of your collective stubbornness and stupidity. Think in terms of advancing the Progressive agenda through ballot measures. That would mean a solid block of 4 supes to put things on the ballot. Right now you can count on Chris and Ross and Avalos and Mar. Pull together cause you're gonna have to row this boat a long way to get anywhere. Progressive 'control' of the Board has been gone a couple of years.

h.

As usual the other old curmudgeon nails it.
Elsbernd, Chu, Alioto-Pier, Dufty, Maxwell, Chiu, Campos. That's now what passes for Progressive in this City !!!
Congratulations and thanks to Mark Sanchez for running a principled, honest and clean campaign. You screwed this one up good Chris. Don't compound your errors in judgement by enabling someone other than Ross to become President. We need him to guide the Board now, and reclaim Room 200 in a couple of years.
What matters is that the public posts and holds you all accountable, it's just too damn bad if free speech afflicts the comfortable and conflicted.
Patrick Monk. RN. Noe Valley.
How ya doing Bulldog. Long time no see.

We had no real progressive choice in D3, but we did have a strong progressive choice in D9 and Quezada's campaign dragged down both progressive Sanchez and Prop B, allowing a moderate to take the most progressive seat.

Eric Quezada's campaign created real, lasting, significant damage to the progressive project, damage that will take time and effort to mend, resources which will not be available for other pressing projects.

Let's not forget that Calvin Welch supported Chamber of Commerce drone Sue Lee in D1, urged us to move Eastern Neighborhoods forward fearing we'd lose the BofS, and, along with Quezada and MAC, were on the receiving end of "major dildo action" by Planning, could have gotten a better deal from the new Board, but have set the stage where lame ducks like Peskin, McGoldrick and Sandoval are sealing the fate for the future of the progressive core. This is all based on a fundamental economic context which no longer exists.

Would it be too delusional to expect Tom Ammiano to stand up one last time for the Mission and wield his clout and stature to call for Eastern Neighborhoods to be delayed until next year when a progressive Board of Supervisors can bring the community into the process to reevaulate the plan?

This will be needed in any event once the Europeans tell us our what our new economic substructure will be, upon which whatever new housing finance realities emerge from the ashes of the system that choked on the housing bubble, so why not anticipate that now?

It is time to evict the professional housing advocates, to put them on the Megans List equivalent for brainchild abuse. It would be bad enough if these clowns were only ineffective, but they are actually causing more damage by their insular bumbling than doing nothing would.

We can do so much better if we take a page out of Barack Obama's book and seek good ideas wherever we can find them rather than allowing those who get paid whether they win or lose to make a career out of not solving problems, but making them worse.

-marc

Looks like the race in 2011 will be Dufty vs Elsbernd. Without the visibility of being Board President, there's no way Gonzalez could have gotten as close as he did.

Gonzalez' primary and, most importantly, runoff campaigns build progressive capacity that remains today, has been consolidated and expanded, and remains available to benefit future progressive contenders.

Board prez helped coalesce that capacity in 2003, but now that its there, it can bootstrap strong candidates.

-marc

Marc,
I absolutely love your housing policy. If I may paraphrase:
Build nothing market rate
Build nothing by any for profit developer
Continue artificially inflated scarcity

But wont you get tired of interviewing every single newcomer to evaluate their progressive worthiness before allowing them to move to SF?
Remember, as youve said previously, we definitely dont want the "wrong" kind of people moving to SF.

Hmmmm,

Danny Glover for Mayor in 2011?

de ja vu ...

h.

Ross deserves to be Board President, and is definitely the best person for the job. I am surprised that Daly and the Supervisors-elect haven't been in unanimous agreement on that since the election.

Not sure if this thread should really degenerate into more housing issues. But I'll add my 2 cents.

Who decides who can live in this City? Who has the right to decide? Is one group better than another? I would love to get subsidized housing but nothing is fair and the current situation is a mess of ill-thought out ideas and poor policies.

And is the City as we know it so great or could it be better? We need safer streets, better schools, less graffiti, well maintained housing. The current mess of housing policies and rent rules is what you get when Policy makers try to appease their constituents and not address the issues as a whole.

Marc is right “It is time to evict the professional housing advocates” just who will replace them?

Yo Marc Lover:

As you can probably tell from reading this blog, Mr. Salomon and I don't always agree on strategies and candidates. But on overall housing policy, he is absolutely right: If we keep building housing exclusively for millionaires, the city as we know it will be destroyed.

Chris P:

Who gets to decide who gets food? Or medical care? We as a society have long agreed that some things are too important to be left entirely to the free market. Housing is the same thing.

Right now, city planners are deciding who gets to live in San Francisco. What they've decided is that rich people get to live here. That's a policy choice, made by bureaucrats and endorsed by politicians.

Deciding that people who aren't rich can also live here is a valid choice as well. The city can make that choice by mandating that a significant amount of new housing is affordable. And regulating high-end condos is just a legitimate as regulating any other land use -- slaughterhouses, rendering plants, chemical factories etc. -- that are only appropriate in certain places and limited numbers.

I just wanted to make sure that even though I am cross with Chris Daly right now over the way certain elections worked out, he is not evil and I do not hate him. He's just wrong.

The market rate housing phenomenon that we've seen in San Francisco over the past fifteen years of housing bubble is the maw end of the interest addicted FIRE (Finance Insurance and Real Estate) sector leveraged beast which is shitting all over Wall Street and taking the global economy down with it. The point of the exercise was not to produce housing so much as to produce mortgages and generate interest and fees, all of which needed to be insured. Housing was the razor, FIRE was the blades.

The economic structural phenomena which led to that bubble no longer exist and most likely will not exist as things move forward. There are those who believe that we are just at a low in a business cycle. But we are really in a triple low, as first the broad wave that troughed in 1930 and arose under Bretton Woods has come full circle. Second, the Reaganist dismantling of the New Deal economic controls led to us to finance instigated bubble economics, and that "false economy" model of providing cheap credit, bidding up commodity prices for things like housing that require loans to purchase and reaping the greater interest payments off of the ever increasing loans and calling it "forming capital" has crashed. And third, the micro cycle that started with the dot.com bust and saw a small recovery has crashed.

The astronomical housing prices in San Francisco have not been caused by scarcity, rather the abundance of global cheap money that can out-compete the local wage base, bidding up prices.

Current Fed/Treasury strategy is to artificially inflate the housing market. But no other entities will lend the US enough money to do subsidize that loss, so they're trying to go monetary on the economy's ass. Of course, Bernacke is having as much success with the economic problems by keeping interest rates low as Carter did by trying to go Keynsian on an economy that was too large to respond to meager stimulus. But cheap money, that it is available, is going to keep stave off housing price deflation for a short time. The upshot will be a structural deflation in housing price on the order of 40-50%, back down to the level that wages can support in areas not subject to global pressures, which tick to a different clock, and given that foreign investors will probably be bailing on the dollar within the next 18 months, we'll probably see inflation in the currency simultaneously. ZImbabwe, anyone?

Also, this refusal by housing boosters and developers to acknowledge the role of housing in creating this global mess and the sharp break from the economic realities which enabled them to a less speculative housing market which is underway is reminiscent of American reds unable to come to terms with the fall of the Soviet Union.

-marc

Actually, I changed my mind as to who should be Board President in order of preference. Here is the new list:

1.) Ross Mirkarimi
2.) John Avalos
3.) Eric Mar
4.) Chris Daly (I'm conflicted about this one, though)
5.) David Campos
6.) David Chiu
7.) Sophie Maxwell
8.) Bevan Dufty
9.) Sean Elsbernd
10.) Carmen Chu
11.) Atilla the Hun
12.) Alioto-Pier

The main problem with Affordable Housing other than lack of available funding is that each nonprofit developer is a hungry mouth to feed just to keep them going, and that sucks down resources. The cartel ensures that so long as everyone submits to control by Calvin Welch, everyone gets a little something. This begs the question as to whether it is more efficient for nonprofits to develop, for for-profits, or for the City to develop as it did for the Plaza Hotel.

The Mayor's Office of housing is another trouble spot. Mayoral control of housing moneys opens the door to politicized abuses, generally declining to act or spend. MoH should be replaced with a Department of Housing overseen by an elected Housing Commission. Grants should be done under sunshine, and the City should build capacity to develop as it did with the PIDC at Plaza.

-marc

Marc:

I will continue to defend your ideas, but the invective against Calvin Welch is not only wrong but does nobody any good. I've disagreed with Calvin on plenty of things, but the guy has devoted his life to making this city a better place. Give some credit where it's due. I've been here for 25 years, and Calvin has been fighting the good fight on the right side of issues over, and over, and over again.

He isn't perfect, and neither am I an neither are you. He stuck with Willie Brown way too long. You may not always agree with his strategies, and that's fine -- but the world, and San Francisco, is a much better place with Calvin in it.

Let's talk about solving problems.

Tim, if we continue to sit by as we lose three out of three affordable housing financing ballot measures in a row and don't evaluate, take stock and recalibrate, then we have no chance of achieving our shared housing policy agenda.

Given the choice between hurting Calvin's feelings and sitting by as under his control he piles up failure after failure, then the choice is obvious. Sometimes learning is a painful experience, but, then again, losing three ballot measures in a row hurts tens of thousands housing situations. And you're concerned about Calvin's feelings?

I guess we just differ in that I've got no problem stepping over people to move progressive policy, which is deemed a great sin while stepping over people to advance one own political career is honored and rewarded.

Calvin's had his chance, and although he's worked hard at times, his approach is realizing increasingly diminished returns. There are countless young progressive activists who know how to win elections, folks like those who brought Avalos and Mar over the line, who should be building the kinds of coalitions of which Calvin is incapable of conceiving.

I know that Calvin supported Sue Lee, but did Calvin embargo Prop B literature from the Mar campaign in D1?

http://cybre.net/pub/propbd1.html

Sorry, Tim, time for our affordable housing community to shit or get off the pot, this is way past ridiculous and demands accountability for all the money involved.

-marc

@Tim
I think we as a society have failed on the issue of who gets Food or Health Care, both locally, nationally and globally. Look at the obesity rates of the poor who are forced to by cheap High Carbo foods. But that is a different issue.
I also don't think the free market is the answer to housing issues. But the current mess of rules is not working; there has been a Housing Crisis in this City for the 20+ years I have lived here.
Let’s try a different way, with Land Trust, Housing Co-Ops and Rent subsidies.
Give incentives to small property owners to invest capital into their holdings, currently small landlords have the upside of their investment limited. Landlords want a stable tenant and a regular return, however landlords in this city will rent to a couple Student before a family as they know there will be a turn over, it’s backwards.
Marc is correct we need to re think this housing issue with new leaders who are willing to change the status quo which dictates all Landlords are bad, tenants are good.
As for Prop. B I actually think it was one of the first housing initiatives that I really agree with, but it was poorly promoted and just seen as more unnecessary spending, also the slogan “Housing for All” really didn’t help.

I'm curious how the current cost of housing has nothing to do with scarcity? SF has only recently built housing in any great numbers - and for almost a decade built only a minute fraction of the housing needed to house its current population - not to mention newcomers.
How can you ignore this?
Yes, the new housing is for millionaires - but there has been a decade long period when SF was building almost no housing..

"the slogan “Housing for All” really didn’t help, when Prop B income levels were downsized into housing for

Prop F failed as viable policy because it was targeted to low income folks exclusively. Whether any attempt to downsize Lennar's profits could have survived the $4m onslaught is dubious.. Attempts to get the legislation to include housing for cops, teachers and firefighters were rejected by the proponents. It is always more difficult to mount a successful campaign against housing for first responders and teachers.

For Prop B, the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods, which strongly supports Affordable Housing in concept because their kids and grandkids who were born here can't afford to live here, endorsed "NO" on Prop B as a retirement fund for Calvin Welch after Calvin Had destroyed the Moscone coalition by making decades of deals with downtown that screwed the outer neighborhoods as a means to keep the nonprofit developers afloat, driving the neighborhoods to cut their own deals with downtown.

If we are going to be able to rebuild that Moscone coalition by uniting the neighborhoods and progressives against downtown, we are going to need to remove the most toxic antagonists from the picture, especially after they've screwed progressives and neighbors over and again by supporting such "progressive" luminaries as Willie Brown in 1999 and Sue Lee this year.

It is time to for the Community Development Corporations, like Big 3 carmakers, to adapt to changing realities or die, as what they're doing and how they're doing it is only making matters worse.

-marc

At an election result map presentation I made last evening, young activists of color related their horror at the authoritarianism and control exercised over Calvin Welch as he went zero for three and led Prop B to defeat.

Just as John Dingell was ousted as Energy Chairman as a new era of environmental consciousness has trumped kowtowing to the big three, Calvin Welch should read the writing on the wall and step back from leadership.

My neighbors, D9 voters, sent Eric Quezada packing when they resoundingly rejected his bid to bring his vision of land use activism to the Board of Supervisors.

We cannot vote out Calvin Welch as D9 voters rejected Quezada, only indict Welch in the public square, such as blogs like this, and point out his record of failure on issues of paramount concern.

Game over, dude.
-marc