Keeping San Francisco a
no-newspaper town. There’s a term in
newspaper parlance to describe the space set aside among the ads for
news: the news hole. Does the Chronicle’s seem to be growing? Or
— look again — is it that the surrounding ads are shrinking?
Each day the paper arrives looking more gaunt, nearly a twin
anorexic sister to the upstart Ex-paper. A sign of an ailing
economy, or an ailing paper?
Ted Fang’s Follies might wish that the news hole
was smaller in the Ex-paper, because the “news” is an
embarrassment. Take the item that ran on Friday, June 29, headlined
“Home Depot moving in after family spat.” To read the piece, you’d
think that Home Depot was on the verge of opening shop at the site
of good old Goodmans Lumber — until the fine print at the very
very end, which reads, “The chain store has yet to get the
approval of the city’s planning commission. It hopes to get the
go-ahead by the end of this year.” In other words, the plans are
still in the planning stage. Good thing, too, because if Examiner
Staff member Angela Privin had talked to the location’s neighbors,
a practice that the much-derided Board of Supervisors strongly urges
these days, she would have discovered that skepticism was rife. The
influential Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center is working on a
comprehensive development plan for the whole Bayshore Corridor,
which may or may nor include a hardware behemoth.
And who on earth was minding the Ex-store when the
schedule for the Fourth of July was compiled? Dubya, maybe. One item
read, “San Francisco Mime Troupe. Delores Park at 1600
Transylvania Ave., South San Francisco.”
Wheels
within wheels, tempests within tempests. Last
Monday, indefatigable mayor-recaller Jim
Reid sent out the following press release: “Homeless Army
assembles at City Hall, Tues., July 3rd at noon, taking to the
streets to begin the campaign to defeat Mayor Brown with pen and
petition.” The idea was to launch a contingent of disaffected
homeless people seeking signatures for Reid’s petition to recall
the mayor.
Chance Martin, of the Coalition
on Homelessness, responded immediately and angrily: “Jim Reid
isn't the first person to exploit homeless people for his own
crackpot agenda, and he's doubtlessly not the last.” Martin added
later, when pressed for clarification, that most of the homeless
folks he’s talked to “roll their eyes heavenward” at the
thought of paying to live in the little units Reid proposes to
sponsor, which many call “doghouses.”
Back to Reid: “I am the only person that I know
of who is talking about building housing for homeless people and
have built a prototype rather than just TALK about it. If that is
exploiting the homeless and if asking homeless people to help gather
signatures to recall a mayor who has criminalized them is exploiting
them, then in the eyes of the COH, I am exploiting the homeless.
When I ran for mayor, I met with Paul Bowden of the COH and he told
me that they DID NOT want shelters, they wanted housing. I proposed
and built housing and invited the COH to come and look at it but
they were too busy. BUT every time that the press said anything good
about my idea, they contacted the COH and they were not too busy to
put down the idea even though they never had the courtesy to look at
the cubicle. I guess my comment is that the Coalition on
Homelessness is part of the problem AND if we ever elect a mayor who
will come up with common-sense solutions to the homeless problem,
the people at COH will be without jobs AND they do not want that to
happen.”
Reid adds, “I will be [at Civic Center Plaza]
with the sign and the flag again next Monday and every Monday until
the deadline for turning in the petitions passes at the end of
September.”
Collapsing collegiality. In
yet another sign that organized labor wields little clout these
days, Lillian Taiz sends this message on behalf of the California
Faculty Association (AAUP/SEIU 1983), the union that represents
20,000 instructional faculty members, as well as the librarians and
counselors, of the 23 California State University campuses:
For the last three years, the union has been in
a serious struggle with the system administration and Chancellor
Charles Reed (who came here from Florida) over the future of
comprehensive public higher education in California. Reed would
like to run the university according to a corporate model,
complete with the casualization of faculty, the weakening of
tenure, the build up of an expensive administrative
superstructure, increases in class sizes, and other provisions
that endanger the quality of education we can offer our students.
Our student are by and large working-class and people of color who
are often the first in the families to attend college. ....
In the last two rounds of bargaining no
agreement was possible and — as state law allows — Chancellor
Reed simply imposed terms and conditions upon the faculty. We will
not let that happen again this year. At the moment the union and
the system administration are at impasse and it is very likely
that faculty will start the fall working without a contract. ...
For more information on this important struggle, visit www.calfac.org.
Going
to the dogs. Chris
Lester, whose photographs have appeared in several issues of the
Call, has moved on to bigger venues, with a show of his doggies at
Cafe International, Haight @ Fillmore. It runs through July.
B.C.
