10.12.04
Letter from California
By Betsey Culp
Mr. Friend, you don’t know it, but a couple of weeks
ago you worked a miracle. Northern California grew eerily still. Airplanes
refused to take off. Taxis forgot to blow their horns. Only the rustle of
pages broke the silence, as hundreds of thousands of people read “Going
Places,” your profile of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. The local media
rejoiced. We’d finally made it to the big time.
By now, we are used to seeing pictures of Newsom in
national magazines. But a tour of the political setting in which he
operates is less common. And so I, for one, gobbled up your words, eager
to see what kind of picture you would paint of the city where I live.
Wherever you were, I don’t live there.
I admit I may be over-reacting, like a person who
refuses to acknowledge a recording of her own voice. I may be quibbling
over details, minor glitches demonstrating merely that the New Yorker’s
famed fact-checkers don’t include anyone who lives in the Bay Area. (Just
for the record, the Sunnydale housing project is in Sunnydale, not the
Bayview. Yes, it’s the Bayview, not simply Bayview — it’s short for
“the Bayview District.”)
But more likely, the hair on the back of my neck is
quivering because of the questions that you didn’t ask, the details you
didn’t feel important enough to include. Without them, our “ambitious
young mayor” has “taken” a generic city, and his accomplishments — whether
successes or failures — are meaningless. Newsom is considered “one of five
stars of the Democratic Party,” with a serious shot at the White House.
And the portrait of him that you present is recognizable. But readers of
the New Yorker deserve more than a photo-op that could have been staged in
any city in America. They deserve to know the place as well as the man.
- - - - - - -
What do I mean? Let’s start with Newsom himself.
Having just turned 37, he is, as you say, “the city’s youngest mayor in
more than a century.” But he is also part of a revolution that began a few
years ago in San Francisco, where one by one the members of the old guard
toppled before a new generation. District Attorney Kamala Harris is 39.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera is 41. Matt Gonzalez, president of the Board
of Supervisors and Newsom’s rival in the mayor’s race, is 39; about half
of the other supervisors are 40 or younger. It’s a young, energetic group,
comfortable with novel approaches to persistent problems: when Newsom went
to Bayview-Hunters Point to play basketball with police officers and young
men from the neighborhood, he was joined by a frequent political opponent,
Supervisor Chris Daly.
The decline of the old order began when the city
returned to the election of supervisors by district in 2000 and culminated
in the mayor’s race of 2003. Newsom is indeed a Democrat, a New Democrat
as eager as Al Gore to “reinvent government.” Gonzalez is indeed a Green.
But in the race for mayor, he was not “the Green Party candidate.” Local
offices are nonpartisan in San Francisco and have been since 1911. During
the early stages of the campaign, the rhetoric adhered to the city’s usual
downtown business/neighborhood split. And the final vote could by no
stretch of the imagination be called a Green referendum: Gonzalez received
119,329 votes to Newsom’s 133,546 in a city where registered Greens number
about 14,000 (there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 247,000
Democrats).
The 2003 campaign energized the city, providing a
template for this year’s presidential campaigns. It’s too bad you weren’t
here then. What a story it would have made! Newsom was well organized,
filing the papers for his candidacy in November 2002, right after voters
approved his homeless measure Care Not Cash. The campaign kick-off was a
mini-presidential convention, complete with signs and balloons. He
particularly attracted a cadre of young men with well-scrubbed faces and
starry eyes, many wearing the white shirts he favors.
Gonzalez, on the other hand, entered the race at the
last minute, in August 2003, when it appeared that the other progressive
candidates were losing momentum. With a firm jaw and longish straight hair
parted in the middle, Gonzalez resembles John Lennon, and he has a similar
effect on women. He put together truly a rainbow coalition of workers,
many of them young people who had never voted before. In the controlled
pandemonium that characterized his campaign headquarters, volunteers set
out a continual supply of food, and the sounds of guitars and yoga
practitioners provided a background for the phone banks. Newsom received
donations of $3.8 million. Gonzalez raised about one-tenth of that amount,
mainly through small contributions and creative fundraising. His art
auctions and poetry readings foreshadowed the bake sales of MoveOn.org.
But somewhere along the way, the contest became
partisan, with Mayor Willie Brown charging that Gonzalez was party
building and nationally prominent Democrats arriving by the airplane-load
to endorse their new standard-bearer. The campaign escalated into a
feeding frenzy. In the end, Newsom’s lead in money, time, and organization
won out.
- - - - - - -
When Newsom moved into Room 200 at City Hall, he
inherited a city that was still nursing its wounds. He also inherited a
host of festering problems. Dealt double body blows by the collapse of the
dot-com boom and the decline of tourism after 9/11, San Francisco’s
economy was on the ropes.
During the happier, headier days of the 1990s, Willie
Brown had sought to create a bright new physical image for the city — some
called it an imperial image — by fostering a long list of major
construction projects including a rebuilt DeYoung Museum, a home for
Bloomingdale’s, a new city-within-the-city at Mission Bay, and a
consolidated TransBay Terminal. At the same time, a runaway housing market
and rampant development had priced homes beyond the pocketbook of most
residents, generating an ugly bitterness in low-income areas. I remember
sitting in a Thai restaurant in the largely Latino Mission District and
listening to a developer complaining, loudly enough so that everyone in
the room could hear, about how much it was costing him to evict the
tenants of a building he had just bought.
Frustration over high housing costs continued after
the economy collapsed, compounded by the sight of a number of projects
where work suddenly ceased when they ran out of money. Downtown, plans for
a Mexican museum designed by Ricardo Legorreta and a Jewish museum
designed by Ground Zero architect Daniel Libeskind floundered. And today
at the corner of Bryant and 20th, in the heart of the Mission,
a large pit — like an Olympic-sized swimming pool with no water — is all
that marks the site of a once-controversial office park.
A reeling economy, a disgruntled citizenry, a
frustrated business community — these were only some of the problems
facing Newsom when he took office. Add to them a perennial homeless
population and a burgeoning crime rate, and you’ve got a pretty stiff
assignment.
- - - - - - -
That’s where Newsom stood in February, barely six
weeks after his inauguration, when he announced that the city would start
marrying same-sex couples. It’s common lore that San Franciscans do not
share the worries over gay marriage that torment many other parts of the
country. But I had forgotten, until the vice presidential debates, how
easily the subject makes even articulate speakers like John Edwards
squirm. For most of us here, we’ve seen too many decent people wrestle
with cruel red tape in dealing with a loved one’s hospitalization, or
agonize over the possible loss of an adopted child. Gay marriage simply
isn’t an issue.
This is not to say that we are unanimous on the
subject. Perish the thought! This is San Francisco, after all. When Rose
Tsai, a candidate for supervisor, espouses “family
values, traditional marriage,” she often gets nods of agreement from
members of the audience.
Despite hostile talk-show ravings elsewhere, and
death threats delivered here, San Franciscans saw the 29-day wedding party
as one long happy moment. If you managed to walk through City Hall at the
time, you must have noticed the joyous atmosphere that filled the marble
chambers. Even city employees, ordinarily rather humorless civil servants
who wear their stern black suits as a badge of honor, stopped to watch as
one couple after another recited their vows. Perhaps you are correct that
the marriages restored the city “to its onetime status as an avatar of
social rebellion.” But they also healed many of the wounds left over from
the mayoral election. Who can resist a wedding, much less 4,000 weddings?
Most of us realized that the unions were unlikely to
survive a court test. But it was the right thing to do. And even now the
glow lingers, long after the events themselves. As people travel
throughout the city, they encounter 130 hearts made of fiberglass or
metal, standing five feet tall, three-dimensional embodiments of the song
made famous by Tony Bennett. Imaginatively decorated by artists or
celebrities and sponsored by local businesses such as Wells Fargo and
Intel Corporation, the hearts will be auctioned off in November to benefit
San Francisco General Hospital. In the meantime, they give new meaning to
the adage, “Home is where the heart is.”
- - - - - - -
Which brings us to homelessness, and the most
puzzling statement in your article: “by my count one recent afternoon,
there were thirty-three people living on United Nations Plaza within view
of the mayor’s office.” If Newsom had taken out his telescope on that
afternoon, he could indeed have seen UN Plaza. On a Thursday, he would
have seen the central walkway lined with tents for the weekly flea market.
On Wednesdays and Fridays, he could have watched customers — Asians from
the nearby Tenderloin, city office workers, tourists — buying produce at
the farmers’ market. Off and on during the summer, he would have seen
people eating their lunch and listening to a noontime concert.
UN Plaza is public space.
On the afternoon you chose to make your informal
survey, Newsom might also have seen some shabbily dressed men and women
sitting on the curbs that define the grassy areas in the plaza (the city
removed all the benches several years ago to prevent people from sleeping
there). Some of them may have had shopping carts. Some of them may even
have been homeless. But not one of them was living in the plaza. Every
night the Department of Public Works dispatches one of its “big trucks” to
hose down the area, making sure that no one plans to camp out there.
During the day, a group of men has also taken to gathering on the
perimeter of a large monument to California’s settlers that splits the
street just west of the plaza. They scatter quickly when a DPW truck
arrives at lunchtime, shooting arcs of water over the entire statue to the
amusement of diners in the Asian Art Museum café alongside.
- - - - - - -
It’s hard to tell, just by looking, whether these
people are homeless. Nevertheless, as you suggest, a lot of San
Franciscans are. Two years ago a survey conducted by the Mayor’s Office of
Homelessness came up with a count of 8,600, which homeless advocates
dismissed as unrealistically low; San Francisco’s official ten-year “Plan
to Abolish Chronic Homelessness,” released last June, places the figure at
15,000. (The population of San Francisco is about 750,000. To give these
numbers a New York perspective, multiply by 10.)
Homeless deaths are also high. The figure of 169 that
Newsom quoted to you describes the period from July 2002 to July 2003, but
it is not an unusual one. More than 135 homeless people died in the city
in 2000, and an average of 110 a year during the period from 1987 to 1998.
It was this, combined with pressure from downtown businesses, that
prompted Newsom into action while he was a supervisor.
But Newsom’s proposals did not fall into a vacuum. In
the spring of 2001 the Local Homeless Coordinating Board released a
detailed five-year plan called “Continuum of Care.” The broad-based city
organization, which includes representatives from labor and business,
nonprofit service providers, and formerly homeless people, put together a
comprehensive approach to homelessness that covered everything from better
data collection to housing construction. In August ten members of the
Board of Supervisors voted to make the plan “the City and County of San
Francisco’s official homeless policy document.” The eleventh supervisor,
Newsom, was absent. Mayor Willie Brown refused to sign the resolution,
arguing that it lacked specific financing provisions.
Almost immediately afterward Newsom began to
introduce legislation on the subject. So did several of his colleagues.
The Chronicle reported that, between September and February alone,
“supervisors introduced 31 pieces of legislation, made 17 requests to the
city attorney for help drafting legislation and made 41 additional
requests for information on homeless issues from city departments.”
It’s hard now to imagine the atmosphere they were
working in. District elections had brought to the Board of Supervisors a
progressive majority determined to find solutions to the problem. But San
Francisco’s tourist-based economy had also sprung a giant leak after 9/11.
Hotels and restaurants lay empty. Spin-off sectors like the arts were
gasping for air. Business leaders, grasping every possible lifeline,
demanded cleaner, less intimidating streets — and cleaner, less
intimidating people on them.
As you say, the issue polarized the city. It
polarized the Board of Supervisors as well. Newsom’s farthest-reaching
proposal — to cut welfare payments in exchange for services — failed at
the Board. It probably would have even if it had been more liberally
constructed, for Newsom was too closely identified with Willie Brown to
get much support. He told me, rather plaintively, that he had tried hard
to bridge the gap, going out for coffee or a beer with his fellow
supervisors again and again, to no avail.
And so he took his plan to the people, in the form of
Ballot Proposition N. In October 2002, just in time for the election, a
new civic group called SFSOS arrived on the scene, led by investment
banker Warren Hellman, Gap founder Don Fisher, and U.S. Senator Dianne
Feinstein. Its mission: to improve the quality of life in the city. Its
first challenge: to deliver a victory for Care Not Cash. In November
Proposition N won by 60 percent.
The subsequent path of the measure has been decidedly
bumpy, with court challenges, alterations by the Board of Supervisors, and
ultimately re-institution by the courts.
- - - - - - -
Today, in many ways, history has passed it by.
Care Not Cash is essentially welfare reform; it
affects the 3,000 people on welfare in San Francisco who are homeless.
Over the past two years the city’s approach has changed, and its thrust —
as seen in the newly released ten-year plan — is now in the direction of
help for its 3,000 “hard-core” homeless, many of whom do not receive
General Assistance.
In addition, contrary to the description in the New
Yorker, the program does not require recipients to exchange their cash
benefits for space in “specialized single-room-occupancy hotels, where
they would receive in-house jobs and addiction counseling.” Prop. N is
less humane, replacing cash subsidies with either long-term supportive
housing in an SRO or a bed for the night in a shelter. While Proposition N
was in limbo, the supervisors passed a resolution introduced by Chris Daly
specifying that actual housing must be available for the program to kick
in. Daly’s plan was superseded when the courts upheld Care Not Cash last
April, but popular support remains for the philosophy behind it.
The new emphasis has led
to a new political approach as well. On this November’s ballot is a $200
million bond measure, a carefully negotiated housing plan that includes
$90 million for supportive housing.
In an election that includes several tax increases, it may be
difficult to obtain the two-thirds vote needed for passage. Aside from an
enthusiastic appearance on the steps of City Hall to kick off the campaign
for the proposition, Newsom has been amazingly quiet on the subject. So
has SFSOS.
- - - - - - -
Newsom has indeed spent more time on issues affecting
San Francisco’s low-income neighborhoods than might have been predicted
from his credentials and support. By the way, your use of the phrase
“inner city” misrepresents the residential patterns of San Francisco. Most
of the areas in question are in the southern hinterlands, wide open spaces
populated in part by people who fled development and redevelopment closer
to downtown. Newsom has been forced to pay attention to them because, as
you suggest, his predecessor Willie Brown did not.
The years of neglect show themselves not only in
lumpy basketball courts and swing sets with no swings. The city is on a
homicide spree — in August the Chronicle announced a record of 61 to date
for the year. (Once again, multiply by 10.) The police complain that their
investigations are hampered by a fear of gang retaliation, which keeps
witnesses from testifying.
In addition, several high-profile cases involving
shootings or beatings by police officers have fueled residents’ already
smoldering distrust of the SFPD. At a forum at the Commonwealth Club,
documentary filmmaker Kevin Epps responded with horror at a suggestion
that officers move into his neighborhood in Hunters Point. It wasn’t just
their presence that bothered him. Epps worried that the neighbor-in-blue
would bring in all his friends and create a new kind of gang hangout: “His
boys gonna hang out there and turn it into a police station.”
- - - - - - -
Relations between the police and the public have been
strained for years, and so have relations between the police and the
district attorney. We saw a brief thaw after the November 2003 election,
when Kamala Harris replaced famously left-leaning Terrence Hallinan.
Harris was seen — perhaps mistakenly — as less interested in social issues
and therefore tougher on crime. The SFPD argued that they had been
spending weeks tracking down suspects only to have the charges dismissed
for lack of evidence. Why bother, they grumbled, and hoped that Harris
would give them a little more satisfaction. Before long, however,
inconsistencies inherent in the system intruded.
Harris had already angered police officers in April
when she announced that she would not pursue the death penalty in the case
of a recently murdered police officer, on the grounds that it would be
nearly impossible to obtain a conviction if she did. She had said during
the campaign last November that she personally opposed capital punishment,
but apparently few people paid any attention to her statement. Now the
uproar was deafening. The police protested. So did Senators Dianne
Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. State Attorney General Bill Lockyer
threatened to take over the prosecution himself. (Later, after reviewing
the case, Lockyer concurred with Harris’s decision.)
In August the feud moved to a new stage, as police
officers began to rely on Ramey warrants — “probable cause warrants,”
which don’t require the approval of the District Attorney’s Office — to
make arrests. Harris began to throw out the resulting cases for
insufficient evidence. Articles in the Chronicle speculated that the real
reason for the arrests was tactical: as you noted, Newsom has been on the
Police Department’s back to improve “its dismal rate of cleared murder
cases.” The probable cause warrants allow the cases to be officially
cleared, whether they actually go to trial or not. The police deny the
charge.
- - - - - - -
If you’re looking for a Californian to profile, you
couldn’t find a better subject than Kamala Harris. A sharp contrast to the
rumpled Irishman she succeeded, San Francisco’s new district attorney is a
slim elegant woman whose name appears frequently on the society pages. Her
father is an economist who grew up in Jamaica, and in the Tiger Woods mode
of journalism, the media tend to identify her as the first
African-American D.A. in California history. But it was her mother, an
endocrinologist who emigrated from India in the 1960s, who stood by her
side as she campaigned.
Or you might take a look at Supervisor Sophie
Maxwell. At the Commonwealth Club forum, both Harris and Maxwell argued
that an increased police presence by itself would not solve problems of
violence. Maxwell is an electrician by trade; tall and statuesque, she is
given to wearing Africa-inspired fabrics and jewelry. She, too, was raised
by a strong mother: Enola Maxwell, who died last year, is well known in
the Bay Area as a civil rights activist. For several years, Sophie Maxwell
was the only woman on the Board of Supervisor. Habitually soft-spoken, she
occasionally shocks observers by lecturing her pugnacious colleagues on
their lack of civility or scolding developers for their failure to hire
more African Americans. In speaking of the increase in homicides, she
said, “We have to deal with it on many different levels…. We’re looking at
jobs. We’re looking at training. We’re looking at taking kids to camp and
trying to have some interaction with the police.”
Kamala Harris agreed: “We really should look at it in
terms of a long-existing problem, which requires therefore a long-term
investment in a solution. And that that solution would have to manifest
itself through financial support and a distribution of resources from the
city to make up for those many many years of neglect, and that it really
would have to be a ten-year plan.”
- - - - - - -
The problem now lies on the doorstep of City Hall. As
you point out, Gavin Newsom has personally visited a number of San
Francisco’s troubled neighborhoods. He recently added the Mission to the
list, where he was “disheartened by the condition of this wonderful and
lively community that has been marked by gang violence, poorly kept
sidewalks, illegal postings, graffiti, broken news racks, broken phones,
shattered light fixtures and unkept garbage cans.” In each case, he
promised a combination of law enforcement and street cleaning as a remedy.
You note Newsom’s admiration for Robert F. Kennedy,
and it’s easy to find a parallel between the mayor’s forays into
low-income areas and Kennedy’s explorations of Bedford-Stuyvesant in the
1960s. But so far, Newsom has been content to repair figurative broken
windows. It will be interesting to see if he, like his hero, leaps beyond
policy to passion. It will be interesting to see if he, like his hero, can
persuade his wealthy supporters to invest in underserved parts of town.
You quote Newsom as saying, “I’ve got my Ph.D. in homelessness and now I’m
getting my Ph.D. in crime.” To succeed, he will also need a Ph.D. in
politics.
- - - - - - -
The New Yorker article closes with an
all-too-familiar San Francisco vignette: “A suspiciously serene rally in
favor of legalizing marijuana was going on [opposite City Hall], and the
air was suddenly pungent with the substance in question.” Images of the
Summer of Love must have struck a responsive chord in other parts of the
United States, because they refuse to die. The only thing missing is a
couple of hippies dancing around a maypole. I won’t get into the politics
of pot clubs, other than to remind you that the city is home to close to
thirty thousand people infected with AIDS, and many of them have found
that marijuana relieves their symptoms as no other medicine does. Like
thousands of gay couples, they would like the law to make honest men and
women out of them. The stock photo you’re re-creating is tired, very
tired. Like gay marriage, the reality is far more complex than the
stereotype.
Mr. Friend, I realize that San Francisco has used up
its credits so you won’t be visiting us again for a while. That’s too bad.
I’d love to show you the city I know.
If you have some free time, you might drop in at the
end of this month, when you can catch a triple-header lively enough to
titillate the most blasé of New Yorkers. Halloween in the Castro offers a
firm reminder that no, Toto, you’re not in Brooklyn any more. If you stick
around till the following Tuesday, you can observe Election Day, San
Francisco-style. This year it promises more than its usual allotment of
oddities, with 16 state and 16 local propositions on the ballot, and 67
candidates for supervisor, spread out over seven districts, to be chosen
for the first time by ranked-choice voting. That night, before the polls
even close, a yearly procession complete with candles, flowers, and
larger-than-life puppets will wind its way through the Mission,
celebrating el Dia de los Muertos. If you liked the “pungent” air you
encountered in front of City Hall, you’ll love the Day of the Dead.
Plumage, politics, and pot. What more could you want?
