Why the rich attack Daly’s voting record on housingText by Sarah Phelan
Illustration by Jose Luis Pavon
Actually, you’ll never see the rich attack Daly’s actual voting record on housing, which you can find here.
That's because facts don’t concern San Francisco’s well-heeled political elite, who remind me of a high school clique that knows how to demean folks they don't like. I always wondered what those folks would do when they grow up. Apparently, some of them run for higher office.
“It’s garbage,” is how cartoonist Jose Luis Pavon, describes C.M. Nevius’ and Sup. Michela Alioto's Pier's most recent attempt to blame San Francisco’s housing crisis on Daly.
Pavon, who grew up in San Francisco, says his grandparents came here in the 1940s and spent their whole lives working, yet none of their grand kids can afford to hang on.
"And I’m scrambling,” said Pavon, who fears that left to millionaires like Mayor Newsom and Alioto-Pier, San Francisco is destined to become another Venice.
‘Venice was really scary,” said Pavon, who visited the fabled city on a recent trip to Italy. “There is virtually no working class at all. The workers all come in on buses, then go back to their ghettos and suburbs at night. Venice is only for the elite rich.”
And just to be clear, this post is about Daly's voting record on housing, not his family's decision to move to Fairfield, which, me thinks, is a whole other story.
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Comments (3)
No one realistically thinks Daly is to blame for every problem. But do take a look at Daly’s voting record; it helps the poor at the expense of the average resident not the very wealthy. Daly may not be the smartest man but it does not take a genius to see the consequences of these policies i.e. bad feeling between landlords and tenants, landlords not re-investing in their properties, run down apartments. It doesn’t have to be this way. Also preventing new buildings and tying the hands of developers, encourages developers to only build apartments for the very wealthy, from whom they can make the best profit.
If you want a city populated with only the poor and the very wealthy continue down the current route that Daly and his ilk have paved, this is not what I call diversfication. If you have a reasonable job with a good salary you struggle to live in SF, you won’t qualify for childcare, food stamps, below market apartments etc. Ironically the Daly’s exodus from SF is a clear example of his own policies not working.
The Daly’s probably thought long and hard about their move and came to the conclusion the suburbs were a better place for them than SF, as do so many others. It also helps that Mummy and Daddy have a few hundred grand to lend. Knowing his current circumstances it is an insult to SF residence that Daly ever qualified for the below market apartment in which he resides. The honorable thing would be to sell his apartment at below market rate, enabling a truly deserving family the opportunity to own. In a similar way the San Francisco so kindly allowed him to do.
Finally during Daly’s tenure on the board he has shown very little class, his spoilt child act may be popular among some of his constituents, but it is really representative of San Francisco?
Luckily for you Daly is as good as checked out of SF and so you need not waist time and energy defending him.
Posted by Chris Pratt | August 1, 2009 07:06 AM
Very good post Chris.
----
Alas, flipping through the channels I saw FOX news shouters defending Palin's crazy antics a few weeks ago, these servile odes to Daly remind me of same.
The two subjects are linked with Daly just as they are linked with right wing knuckle heads who vote the straight "homo beware" ticket and then get caught in a bathroom with another dude. Or jesus freaks who get busted doing meth with male prostitutes.
Calling bullshit on hypocrisy isn't just for the other side.
Daly's veneer reminds me of David Horowitz, a liberal intellectualism as thin as tissue paper, if Daly ever has to survive in the real world I suspect he will be a equally condescending shrill neo-con like Horowitz.
"Idealism" with other people's money is fine, when it hits home it is a whole other story.
Posted by glen matlock | August 1, 2009 01:56 PM
We saw all about "idealism" with other people's money on Wall Street over the past decade as it fueled housing fetishization which ran roughshod over our cities and stunk up the financial system with its mortgage turds. That market distortion is at the root of the housing crisis in San Francisco. The only failure of progressives is the inability to articulate a successful challenge to that economic sector for which the cost of political campaigns and influence peddling is mere rounding error on revenues. Government is the only structure in place capable of counterbalancing those destructive impulses.
Whomever you chose to "blame" for failure to successfully address the deteriorating housing situation caused by speculation, Daly or the Affordable Housing Mafia, the effort to promote housing justice in San Francisco has pointedly excluded the any of the "un poor" because they are all viewed as "well off" by middle class activists who are ashamed at their own middle class roots. And that does not directly serve the housing needs of enough people to create a viable coalition, and in order to make it anywhere near a majority, it relies heavily on an appeal to liberal guilt. Given that this method has fallen short at the ballot box in three out of three elections over the past ten years, given that our communities clocks were cleaned in Market Octavia and Eastern Neighborhoods, that approach must be abandoned now.
Daly has done yeoman's work in advancing housing rights for San Franciscans, unfortunately, by the numbers, Chris' efforts have been too little, too late and does not "bend the curve" on housing justice so that it comes any closer over time to that of the forces of profit. That said, if Daly could not succeed with his talents, few could probably have done no better.
Again, resources are left on the table when paid advocates and paid policymakers hold the cards close to their vests ostensibly with the best interests of average San Franciscans at heart. This has been disastrous in the housing sector, where we are nowhere near achieving parity as far as housing equity goes, either at the ballot box or as concerns planning issues, as it has been in freezing the 1997 bicycle plan for the past five years which will begin to be implemented in late 2009.
By the numbers, the nonprofit advocacy model is failing San Franciscans where it counts, but it is considered bad manners within progocialite circles to say this.
At this rate, it is simply a matter of negotiating surrender through attrition, and this applies to the trophy poor served by the nonprofit industrial complex as well as the non-rich who must compete to win the lottery for perhaps one in eight of new luxury condos being entitled if they or their kids have any hope of remaining in San Francisco. Of course, those nonprofiteers being paid to do so are riding the ship down.
At the end of the day, no matter whether you live on SSI in a TL SRO or are making $125K, compared to the people who think the own this city, we are all low income and we, progressives, had better start acting like it or we'll all be subject to displacement to make way for an evolving theme park for trustafarian hipsters, yet another "destination" on San Francisco's "vibrant" "experience economy" and a damn good place to make a quick speculative buck.
-marc
Posted by marcos | August 2, 2009 09:53 AM