Tag: housing

  • LPSF Ballot Recommendations – March 5, 2024 Election

    LPSF Ballot Recommendations – March 5, 2024 Election

    Proposition A (“Affordable” Housing Bonds) – NO  

    Here we go again. Another election, another tax increase in the form of borrowing money that taxpayers will be expected to repay – the least fiscally responsible way to fund stuff, since you have to pay a lot of interest on top of the actual amount you borrow. In this case, Controller Ben Rosenfield reports that the “best estimate” of the cost of borrowing $300 million by selling bonds would be “approximately $544.5 million”. Once again, proponents are playing dishonest word games to pretend that the bond measure is cost-free, claiming in their ballot argument that Prop. A “does not increase property tax rates”, even though the costs are right there in the controller’s statement, which notes that the cost for someone with a house valued at $700,000 would be approximately $55 a year.  

     

    Proposition B (Police Staffing) – NO

    It’s shameful how quickly some politicians have abandoned the calls for police reform they took up in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, and have now gone back to carrying water for the powerful law enforcement lobby. One side in this fight wants to hire more cops immediately out of the existing budget at the expense of other programs and services, while they other side wants to use the supposed need for more cops as an excuse to raise taxes. The reality is they are both wrong. San Francisco does not need more police. The city already has more law enforcement personnel, per capita, than Paris did under the hated regime of Louis the XIV before the French Revolution. Contrary to what fearmongers want you to believe, violent crime in the city is significantly lower than it was in past decades. But it’s higher than it would be if the politicians would stop criminalizing people for trying to protect themselves, and respect our individual right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

     

    Proposition C (Real estate transfer tax exemption) – YES

    Just about any tax reduction is good news, and the need to revitalize the downtown neighborhood by allowing vacant office buildings to be repurposed is severe enough that it’s gotten the mayor and some of the supervisors to rein in government greed for a change. While it wouldn’t Prop. C also has the admirable feature of allowing the Board of Supervisors to further reduce the transfer tax (but not raise it!) in the future, without special voter approval.

     

    Proposition D (Ethics) – NO POSITION

    When it comes to ethics measures on the ballot, we’re often reminded of the metaphor about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. This one will pass – they always do. Everyone claims they’re against corruption, at least until they get caught engaging in it. Yet the perennial problem of self-dealing doesn’t go away, because these measures never address the fundamental issue – government has too much power, which draws money and lobbying from those trying to get politicians and bureaucrats to use that power, and the stolen taxpayer money at their disposal, to benefit them and their interests, the way a big steaming pile of cow manure draws flies. While Proposition D might do some good on the margins by closing off a few avenues for city officials to enrich themselves at the public’s expense, it does nothing to rein in State power. As long as the excessive power over the economy and people’s lives is there, money will continue flowing into politics the way water flows downhill, routing around whatever obstacles are placed in its path. We also wonder what politically correct DEI type indoctrination may be bundled into the “ethics training” the measure would require city officials to undergo, although on the bright side, every hour they spend sitting around listening to lectures on ethics is an hour less to spend potentially engaged in other more harmful activities such as writing up new laws and regulations violating other people’s rights.

     

    Proposition E (increased police powers) – NO
    The way the ballot description for this measure opens is really misleading: “Shall the city allow the Police Department to hold community meetings before the Police Commission can change policing policies…?” What’s wrong with having more public input, right? But Prop. E’s presentation is deceptive, because whether or not there are community meetings about proposed changes in SFPD policies is not what’s at the heart of this measure. What it’s really about is expanding police powers at the expense of civil liberties. Adding more surveillance cameras, drones, and other intrusive new technologies to monitor and spy on the public, including at political protests. Letting police engage in high-speed car chases of suspects even if it endangers pedestrians and other members of the public (as such chases often do), etc. If you understand that we already live in too much of a police state, and that going further down this road will ultimately make all of us LESS, not more safe – as we hope Libertarians do – opposing this measure is a no-brainer.

     

    Proposition F (Making people get drug tested to receive welfare) – NO
    As long as the right to choose what you put into your own body is being wrongfully criminalized, a measure like Prop. F that adds new government policies further stigmatizing the use of banned substances is a step in the wrong direction. Government welfare is bad enough to begin with – it relies on stolen tax money and typically fosters a culture of dependency on government among recipients, often with rules that create perverse incentives for people not to work (e.g. paying them less if they get jobs). But when it starts to involve attempted social engineering by the State, it takes on a more sinister character. You may like the idea of incentivizing people to stop abusing drugs, but once the precedent of government discriminating against people whose lifestyles those in power don’t approve of is established, will you like it when you find yourself ineligible for various things your taxes have paid for because something you do is deemed to no longer be “politically correct”? Like, say, being denied health care benefits if you have “too much” screen time? If tax-funded welfare has a legitimate purpose it is a humanitarian one, not turning the state into a de facto church that punishes you for various perceived “sins”.

     

    Proposition G (8th grade algebra) – NO POSITION

    Libertarians generally favor the separation of School and State, and would like to see government get out of the education business altogether. So tinkering with the details of the curriculum in government-run schools doesn’t greatly excite us. Prop. G isn’t even a binding measure, but would simply put voters on record asking the school district to overturn its decision to stop offering algebra to 8th grade students (a subject it now offers only to those in high school, which proponents say harms those seeking to pursue a college prepratory focus on STEM (Science Technology, Engineering, and Math) that includes higher math classes in subjects like calculus. Our opinions about the value of algebra vary, but we generally support students and families having more educational choices. On the other hand, the most meaningful and positive educational choice they could make is getting their kids out of government schools. To the extent these schools fail to adopt reforms that ameliorate parental concerns and prompt more families to exit the SF Unified School District, this could be a positive outcome. Yet we’re reluctant to embrace this kind of cynical strategy of hoping things get worse in the short run.

  • November 2020 Ballot Recommendations

    Proposition A – NO. This $960 million bond measure (the estimated cost to taxpayers of borrowing $487.5 million after all the interest and costs are paid) promises everything but the kitchen sink. Prop. A would supposedly fund “investments” (the Voter Information Pamphlet’s biased language) in “supportive housing facilities”, shelters, parks, recreation facilities, facilities for “persons experiencing mental health challenges”, streets, etc. All things that could be paid for out of the city government’s $13.7 billion regular budget (a budget larger than those of many states and even most countries!). But as CPA and former civil grand jury member Craig Weber pointed out, they would rather spend that budget on things like an average salary of $108,774 and an additional average cost of $49,864 in benefits for their over 38,000 employees (a bloated “city family” larger than the entire city of Burlingame).

    Proposition B – NO. We’re sympathetic to the desire to shake things up after Mohammed Nuru, the longtime head of the Department of Public Works (and ex-boyfriend of mayor London Breed) was arrested by the FBI on multiple charges of corruption. But Prop. B isn’t exactly a house-cleaning. Nearly half of current DPW employees would just be transferred to a newly-created Department of Sanitation and Streets, with duplicative support staff meaning an additional cost of $2.5 to $6 million annually, according to the Controller’s statement. What it does not do is guarantee that bureaucrats who are not doing their jobs in keeping the streets clean will be replaced, or that the new department won’t be subject to the same kind of cronyistic political appointments as the old one. As former judge Quentin Kopp notes, it’s just an attempt to “take the heat off City Hall criminality” without fundamentally changing anything.

    Proposition C – YES. This measure would simply give non-citizen residents the same opportunity as other San Franciscans to serve on city boards, commissions, and advisory bodies. Libertarians strongly support the right of people to move freely from one country to another, and for people to have full equality under the law regardless of citizenship, which is ultimately just another Big Government program that enables those in power to divide and control people and extort money from them on the basis of nationality. According to a ballot argument by the LGBT Asylum Project and others, 35% of voting-age San Franciscans are foreign-born, and we oppose restricting any of these individuals from full political participation. As we argue in a paid statement in the Voter Information Pamphlet, “Laws must not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of innate characteristics like race, gender, sexual orientation, or national origin.”

    Proposition D – YES. While we generally oppose additional government spending and bureaucracy, the life and death power that law enforcement agents have over the rest of us creates an even more pressing need for independent oversight than is the case for the rest of government. Incidents like the gladiator-style fights that the Public Defenders Office learned some SF sheriff’s deputies were staging among inmates for their own amusement, drive the point home. Prop. D would create an Office of Inspector General with the power to investigate in-custody deaths and complaints against Sheriff’s Department employees and contractors in at least some cases, and make recommendations regarding the department’s use of force policies. Also an Oversight Board that would hold public meetings and receive input from the public, as well as being able to subpoena witnesses and require the production of evidence. At less then a $3 million additional annual cost, this seems like a good pro-freedom tradeoff. In the wake of the killings of George Floyd and numerous other Americans at the hands of law enforcement, the need to rein in the abuses of gun-toting government agents should be abundantly clear to everyone, and this measure to create some independent oversight of the 800 or so SF Sheriff’s Department employees should do at least a bit to help.

    Proposition E – YES. This measure would remove the absurd requirement that San Francisco maintain a minimum of 1,971 sworn SFPD officers, a mandate so out of whack with actual needs and budgetary considerations that it has not even been consistently followed anyway. Our paid ballot argument supporting Prop. E notes that this force size exceeds not only that of neighboring cities like San Jose, which has more residents than San Francisco, but even the per capita policing in Paris under the hated regime of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette that was overthrown in the French Revolution of 1789! While certain types of incidents such as auto break-ins have been up the past few years, the SFPD has plenty of capacity to address this trend if they get their priorities straight and focus on investigating and responding to real crimes against life, liberty, and property, rather than victimless actions like drug sales and use, prostitution, and public camping. Additionally, mental health crises and other types of service calls should involve personnel trained to address those situations, not police officers (who have a disturbing tendency to use excessive force against the mentally ill and others), and efforts underway to transfer some of these responsibilities away from the SFPD will likewise free up  more officers to focus on apprehending actual criminals.

    Proposition F – NO. Trying to parse what this 125-page monstrosity of a ballot measure would actually do is extremely difficult, which is a reason in itself to regard it with a high degree of skepticism. We couldn’t figure out from the text itself what the net effect of swapping a payroll tax for a gross receipts tax in all their respective intricacies would be, but according to the Controller’s statement it amounts to an estimated $97 million/year tax increase. Which is no doubt why Mayor Breed and the entire Board of Supervisors, unreformed statists all, are supporting it. You might think politicians would have more sense than to try to foist a massive tax hike on local businesses during a government lockdown that has already forced more than half of The City’s retailers to close their doors, many of them permanently, but you would be underestimating #GovernmentGreed. The Democrats who run SF claim that Prop. F would provide relief for businesses most impacted by the government’s ham-fisted response to Covid-19, but of course they could have provided that relief without tying it to higher levels of legalized theft that will harm other businesses.

    Proposition G – NO POSITION. We debated this one. Several of us thought this was a clear libertarian “yes”, but several other members had concerns including that minors still legally under the control of their parents could be influenced by them on how to vote. On the flip side, 16 and 17 year olds do still pay sales tax and other taxes, and “taxation without representation” was one of the prominent complaints of the American colonists who seceded from Great Britain in 1776. You make the call.

    Proposition H – YES. Prop. H represents a rare local ballot measure that would actually increase economic freedom, by streamlining or eliminating a few of the city government’s myriad noxious regulations that make it expensive and difficult to start and maintain a business in San Francisco. Currently, the Planning Code needlessly prohibits many sensible and harmless uses of commercial space. This has contributed, even pre-Covid19, to a glut of business failures and vacant storefronts. One sentence in the Controller’s statement kind of says it all, noting that under the measure, “Fees for additional reviews required due to City errors would be waived.” Does anyone other than the most retromingent statists think it’s reasonable to impose additional fees on businesses as a result of government errors?

    Proposition I – NO. Riddle: How do you top an effort to increase business taxes by $97 million during the worst economic downturn the U.S. has seen since the Great Recession, if not the Great Depression (Prop. F)? Why, with an effort to raise real estate taxes during a housing shortage when there are over 8,000 homeless people on the streets of San Francisco according to the official count (which is probably an underestimate) by double that amount. This would be Prop. I, which the Controller’s statement estimates would add an average $196 million a year to the cost of housing and commercial real estate. A pair of small business owners writing in the Voter Information Pamphlet note that the measure doesn’t just apply to the sale of property, but also to small business and storefront leases – in other words, a hit on some of the same businesses that some of the same Supervisors supporting this proposition claim that they are trying to help with Prop. F. “At a time when many [mom and pop businesses] are desperately trying to sell, break, or renegotiate their leases, this tax will increase their rents and threaten their safety nets when they can least afford it,” write small business owners Gwen Kaplan and Rodney Fong.

    Proposition J – NO. What would an election be without some kind of appeal to rob people “for the children”? Enter Prop. J, a regressive $48 million annual parcel tax increase that would hit every property owner (small or large) in the city not given a special exemption with an extra $320 on their property tax bill, to flow into the coffers of the SF Unified School District. Close behind appeals to commit robbery for the children are arguments to do it for the teachers, and this measure promises “raising the salaries of teachers” – oh, and unspecified “other School District employees” (read: members of bloated administrative non-teaching staff). The SFUSD would also have the “sole discretion as to allocation of the proceeds” among these and other assorted purposes – meaning they could if they chose spend 90% of the money on more administrative bureaucracy.

    Proposition K – NO. The LPSF won the “lottery” process to be selected as the official opponent on this one, and its supporters – again a laundry list of local political power players including every member of the Board of Supervisors – decided to try to sell it as an anti-racism measure, touting the fact that it would override the California Constitution’s Article 34, a 1950 ban on government development of housing for low income persons unless first authorized by a public vote. “Prop. K is a step towards removing this racist legacy”, they write. In reality Article 34 says nothing about race, and does not stop low cost housing from being built by independent builders. It simply prevents government officials from using taxpayer money to subsidize such housing against the will of the public. The irony is that supporters of Prop. K are making arguments suggesting that they want to engage in racism by handing out housing on a preferential basis to people of certain racial backgrounds. Rather than attempting to get into the housing construction business, an endeavor that won’t end well, the mayor and Board of Supervisors should cut the red tape and expensive bureaucratic requirements that prevent more affordable housing getting built by independent builders. Legalize tiny homes and ADUs (accessory dwelling units, also called “granny units”), for example. And make more legal free parking places for people living in RVs and vans. Those options won’t be ideal housing for everyone, but they work for many people and are better than sleeping on the street, as thousands of San Franciscans do now.

    Proposition L – NO. This is an effort to pressure businesses to pay their top executives less, or other workers more, when those executives receive more than 100 times the median pay of their workers, by stealing more money from such companies in the form of a higher gross receipts or payroll tax. Unfortunately, robbing a company as a whole won’t necessarily come at the expense of its overpaid executives, but could easily instead negatively impact other workers who may see lower compensation or be more likely to lose their jobs (or not get hired in the first place), as well as at the expense of members of the public who could face higher prices for the company’s products. It could also cause some businesses to stop doing business in San Francisco, costing local jobs and reducing the choices available to residents. Executive overpay is a legitimate concern when driven by factors other than simple market-based compensation based on relative demand for different types of labor and skills, but a better way to address the issue is through corporate governance reforms to make management more accountable to shareholders. Not by simply feeding a State which is even more bloated than the biggest independent companies and whose own top employees are already overpaid at the public’s expense.<!–break–>

  • March 3, 2020 Ballot Recommendations

                Longtime freedom-oriented observers of politics in the City by the Bay won’t be greatly surprised that exactly none of the local measures on the March 3 ballot are worth supporting. The Libertarian Party of San Francisco recommends voting NO on all five. Here’s some brief thoughts on why:

     

    Proposition A – $845 million City College “Job Training, Repair and Earthquake Safety” bond

    According to a faculty union representing teachers at City College, spending on administration has grown to comprise 10% of the school’s personnel costs, up from 7% just five years ago.

    An October bulletin published by the union describes how students, teachers and community members recently had to “push back on exorbitant raises” for top administrators, “including a proposal to compensate Associate Vice Chancellors at $275K/yr.” Meanwhile, City College enrollment is down from 90,000 in 2011-2012 to 65,000 today, according to a piece by Marc Joffe of the Reason Foundation. “With so many San Franciscans living on the streets, investing in educational infrastructure seems to be an especially odd priority,” he writes. We agree. Vote NO on Prop. A.

    Proposition B – $628.5 million “Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response” bond

    Another massive tax-and-spend measure in the name of “safety”. San Franciscans have already voted time and again to appropriate money for earthquake preparedness and emergency services. Just last year voters adopted a $425 million bond measure billed as protecting the city from flooding and earthquakes. As with all bond spending, this measure is wasteful – the controller estimates that borrowing $628.5 million will end up costing taxpayers over $1 billion by the time the principal is repaid with interest to the companies financing the bonds. A nice deal for Wall Street financiers perhaps, but not so great for overtaxed residents including tenants, who could see up to half the cost of the measure passed along to them in the form of higher rents.

    Proposition C – Retiree Benefits for Former SF Housing Authority Employees

    The Housing Authority is a local agency, but has been funded by the federal government. Now some former SFHA employees are being hired by the city government. This measure would make them eligible for city government retirement benefits based not just on their time as municipal employees, but also based on the years they spent drawing federal government paychecks. This sounds like a recipe for double-dipping, and most government employees are already over-compensated compared to people doing similar work in the voluntary sector. Increasing government employee compensation also means stealing more money from the taxpayers to pay for it. We say Vote NO.

    Proposition D – Vacancy Tax

    This measure would tax owners of commercial storefront property for allowing it to sit vacant, incentivizing landlords to rush to fill leases quickly rather than taking the time to consult with community members and groups and seek out tenants who are a good match for their neighborhoods. The usually statist editors of the Bay Area Reporter newspaper correctly point out that retail vacancies are growing nationally “as a result of the convenience of online shopping, competitive prices, and speedy delivery”, and that “the challenges of doing business in San Francisco” , among them “bureaucratic red tape and a protracted permitting process, onerous taxes, scarcity of workers” make the problem even worse here. They note that instead of “doing the hard work of cutting the red tape that frustrates and discourages businesses from operating in our neighborhoods,” the Board of Supervisors “punted and placed Prop. D on the ballot.” We agree – please vote NO.

    Proposition E – Limits on Office Development

    This measure would limit the amount of office space that can be built in San Francisco unless the city government meets its goals for the development of “affordable” housing. More housing is urgently needed, but development of new office space should not be held hostage to this need. Creating laws like this based on guesses about what future needs will be is a bad idea. Limiting creation of office space will also pave the way for politicians to hand out special exemptions based on political favoritism and corruption. One such loophole already built into the measure would allow new office space development in exchange for affordable housing being built off-site, but would require such off-site housing to be located “within an economically disadvantaged community”. In other words, new housing for poor people would have to be located in places where poor people already live, further reinforcing the de facto segregation of the city into poor and wealthy areas, as driven by past government policies like redlining, rather than allowing market development to happen organically. Vote NO on Prop. E.

    Aside from voting to oppose the ballot measures, the LPSF also voted to support three candidates in this election:

    Starchild for State Assembly (write-in)

    Such is the lack of democracy in this largely one-party town that incumbent Assembly member David Chiu was the only candidate to fill for his District 17 seat that comprises the eastern half of San Francisco, leaving an opening for a write-in candidate to run in the primary and automatically appear on the November ballot without having to feed the State by paying a filing fee of hundreds of dollars. LPSF chair Starchild decided this was too good an opportunity to pass up, and decided to collect the signatures needed to be that candidate. The erotic service provider and freedom activist says the core of his campaign message will be the idea of a consent-based society in which government does not tell people what to do with their own bodies and resources, and you can live your life as you choose so long as it does not involve initiating force or fraud against others. “Consent is not just about sex, it matters in every aspect of our lives,” Starchild asserts. He also pledges to champion the rights of homeless people, immigrants, sex workers, independent and homeschool families, the kink and poly communities, people in the cannabis and psychedelic communities, and others who have been marginalized and harmed by the statist quo, while cutting the 6-figure salaries and lavish benefits of those in government who are profiting off the backs of the poor and the victims of government taxes and fees.

    Maria Evangelista for Superior Court Judge

    Like newly elected district attorney Chesa Boudin, Maria Evangelista is a public defender who has worked at the award-winning SF Public Defender’s Office built by the late Jeff Adachi. Her opponent, by contrast, is a former prosecutor. In a criminal justice system that has given the U.S. what is widely reported to be the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, we need more judges whose background is in trying to keep people out of jail, rather than trying to lock them up. Evangelista’s parents emigrated from Mexico to work as farm workers and took refuge here in San Francisco as undocumented migrants, and her mother collected recycling to help make ends meet, so she has first-hand experience of being poor and on the wrong side of the authorities, if not the law (the Feds actually have no constitutional authority to criminalize or regulate who migrates to the U.S., only the process of becoming a citizen). “Every day I see how our courts have failed to meaningfully address homelessness, car break-ins, and violence”, she writes. “Everyday I see how the courts are disproportionately arresting and imprisoning people of color. We are stuck in a cycle of catch, imprison and release.” It is notoriously difficult to find solid information on the policy positions of candidates for judge, but from her background we believe Maria Evangelista is likely to be the more pro-freedom candidate in this race, and recommend Libertarians support her for Seat 1 on the Superior Court.

    John Dennis for Congress

    There was some dispute in our ranks as to whether we should be recommending a vote for a Republican in a partisan race, but John Dennis has a history of engagement with the freedom movement dating back to Ron Paul’s first campaign for president back in 2007, when he walked the streets alongside many of us canvassing for the libertarian Republican and lifetime Libertarian Party member. A plurality of our committee felt that history, and his positions aside from some regrettable stances on immigration and homelessness, make him a more pro-freedom choice than establishment incumbent Nancy Pelosi or any of her other challengers. John is against overseas wars and in favor of cutting Pentagon as well as other government spending, auditing the Federal Reserve, a return to sound money, and reining in warrantless spying on Americans by the federal government. While we cannot endorse candidates of other parties, we recommend a vote for John Dennis for Congress in District 12 as the best choice in a race without a Libertarian candidate.

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  • Where Good Ideas Go To Die

    Where Good Ideas Go To Die

    It’s common knowledge that San Francisco has thousands of homeless people living on the streets and a shortage of not just housing, but even temporary shelter space. San Francisco also has a government-run school system that includes over a hundred schools occupying public space, each with multiple buildings that are vacant and unused at night.

    At some point, someone – probably multiple someones, perhaps even including yourself – may have thought, “Instead of having people without homes out on the streets, at risk of illness or death from exposure, crime, etc, and without places to practice proper sanitation and hygiene, or spending a bunch of taxpayer funds building new shelter facilities, why not let some of the homeless in these unused existing public facilities, where they will be safe and can have access to restrooms and showers?”

    As you may or may not be aware, this is not a hypothetical. Not only was this idea contemplated, it has actually been put into effect as a government program – well, sort of. So how is that working out for us?

    To begin with, the idea was pared way back, limiting the number of people likely to be helped by it. Rather than making space available after hours at government schools in different neighborhoods across the city, the program was limited to a single school, Buena Vista Horace Mann (BVHM), a Mission district kindergarten through 8th grade school located at 3351 23rd Street.

    Then the program was further limited to serving families with children attending that particular school, with assurances to this effect presumably intended to pacify neighborhood and school community xenophobes.

    Did I say xenophobes? Sadly, yes.

    Fear and hostility toward outsiders, people who aren’t here now, aren’t part of the “in group” isn’t just a thing with Donald Trump and his supporters – it’s also a local thing here in SF. Especially (at both the national and the local level) if those outsiders happen to be poor.

    City officials may be regretting those assurances however, because now – after reportedly sinking money into startup costs such as putting in new showers (did the school previously lack showers for students using the gym? were those showers not good enough for homeless people?) – they say they can’t continue the program unless they expand it, because not enough homeless families with students at Buena Vista Horace Mann are applying.

    Did I say applying? Sadly, yes.

    You might think that something like making BVHM’s gymnasium available after hours to homeless families needing a place to stay for the night would be pretty straightforward: Somebody shows up with kids needing a place to sleep for the night, you let them in. Hardly even worthy of being called a “program”. When I let friends or others crash at my place, I don’t call it a program, and there is no application process – people just ask me. But when it comes to government, nothing’s ever so simple. Government is where good ideas go to die.

    Here’s how the “program” is actually working (or not working):

    “Interested families usually begin the conversation by saying they are running out of housing options and they were told the school has a shelter,” writes reporter David Mamaril Horowitz in the bilingual Mission-area newspaper El Tecolote. “They first speak to Chandler”.

    That would be Nick Chandler, the schools’s social worker. According to El Tecolote, he then “vets” these families and “forwards them to Dolores Street Community Services” (DSCS). Why DSCS? Because they are the non-profit organization managing the “shelter”. You might think the school itself should be capable of managing the task of allowing students from its own student body, and their families, to use its own gymnasium, but you are not thinking like a government bureaucrat.

    DSCS’s Mayra Medel-Sanchez is the project’s program manager. You might assume that title means she’s in charge of designing and planning the program. You would be wrong again. They have a separate person for that, one Saul Hidalgo.

    Both Hidalgo and Medel-Sanchez defended the program to El Tecolote (surprise, surprise). But then again, who are they not to have an opinion, when on any given day they may comprise a double digit percentage of the program’s direct beneficiaries?

    That’s right – since it was opened as a shelter in November, according to a critical March 1 story by Jill Tucker and Trisha Thadani in the San Francisco Chronicle, the gym at BVHM has had “an average occupancy of less than two people per night”.

    Tucker and Thadani didn’t get that information from the program’s managers, according to the story, but from yet another individual being supported by tax dollars to “help” the homeless – Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing director Jeff Kositsky. (Kositsky’s salary of $205,000 a year is presumably not factored into the reported cost of the program – more on which shortly.)

    Although the facility fails to attract any homeless individuals several nights a month, Kositsky said that doesn’t mean it’s completely empty at these times. “Shelter workers are on-site seven nights a week and through holidays, whether anyone shows up or not,” he told the Chronicle. Must be a tough gig!

    The total number of families who’ve used the “shelter” since it’s been open? Five, according to the Chronicle. Seven, according to Nuala Sawyer in SF Weekly, who took the daily paper to task for “implying it’s a failure”. “What may need to happen is a reframing of the program,” Sawyer opined.

    Meanwhile, according to the Chronicle, the city government is paying Dolores Street Community Services $40,000 a month to manage the program (wrong, it’s only $37,000 a month, says SF Weekly). Either way, this doesn’t include any program-related outlays or other costs incurred by Buena Vista Horace Mann school or the city government, such as the aforementioned startup costs. (I couldn’t find an estimate of those costs; Sawyer reports the new showers were “donated with pro bono work”, although by whom, or why, and whether there were any other costs involved, she doesn’t say.)

    This means that for the three-month period of December through February, taxpayers have shelled out a bare minimum of $111,000, and probably significantly more, so that between five and seven families have been able to spend some time sleeping on the floor of a gymnasium.

    Perhaps in future months administrators could instead consider putting homeless families up at the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons, where they could have full access to the hotel’s concierge service to connect them to local resources? With monthly rates at these hotels, they might be able to save some money.

    But in government it’s all about perceptions, so Sawyer’s proposed “reframing” is a more likely outcome for what responsible (or irresponsible, depending on your point of view) parties are calling the “Stay Over Program”. What would this involve? Essentially “keeping people out of the gym’s shelter” rather than getting them into it. If that sounds odd, it is not without precedent – government has long been paying farmers not to grow food, and there is the famous, if possibly apocryphal, story of the U.S. general in Vietnam who explained how they had to bomb a village in order to save it.

    In seeking to continue the program, BVHM principal Claudia DeLarios Morán, program manager Medel-Sanchez, Sawyer, and others, claim the number of families who’ve been sleeping in the gym doesn’t tell the real story. The real benefit, they assert in so many words, has been getting people into other government programs.

    “All participants in the program register with the the city’s Mission Access Point, which enters them into the city’s homelessness response system and makes them eligible for its services. They are also able to meet with a case manager who provides counseling and guides them to resources,” program manager Medel-Sanchez told El Tecolote.

    The paper reported that 59 Horace Mann families (out of an initial 64 that SF Weekly says were identified as “housing insecure”) have spoken with Chandler, and at least 26 have “received case management”.

    Once families show up at the shelter, they “receive support and services from trained professionals who have the connections to get them help,” DeLarios Morán told SF Weekly. That wasn’t happening previously, she said. “This is a level of coherence we’ve never really had before.”

    Since the families had already been identified, you might think that much could have happened without the need to pay a non-profit group tens of thousands of dollars a month to run a shelter that few of them apparently wanted to use. But again, you would not be thinking like a bureaucrat – remember, these are “trained professionals”.

    Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who initially championed the idea in Spring 2018 along with DeLarios Morán and in whose district this is all taking place, said the program won’t be continued unless it can be made more cost-effective. For the number of families involved, it “doesn’t make any financial sense,” she admitted to SF Weekly. “We might as well buy a condo for that amount of money,” she said. Yup, or failing that, give the Ritz-Carlton a call.

    Along with pretty much everyone else quoted by the media with the exception of the NIMBYs, Ronen favored expanding the program to allow the families of students attending other schools in the district to participate. On March 12, members of the SF Unified School District’s Board of Education, aka the school board, agreed, unanimously voting to do what common sense suggests should have been done in the first place. At a minimum, that is – I’ve seen no explanation for why homeless people not related to SFUSD students, whose taxes after all help pay for those government schools, shouldn’t also be allowed to participate. In any case, the “Stay Over Program”, rather than being slated for shutdown on June 30, got a new lease on life.

    The NIMBYs aren’t without some wisdom of their own, however, even if their motives may be less than pure. “This is not to me a success,” BVHM parent Johanna Lopez Miyaki told the Chronicle. “Why didn’t they ask those 60 families what they needed? Why didn’t they ask the 60 families if they wanted to sleep on the gym floor?”

    An estimated 2,200 students in the SFUSD “cope with homelessness or housing insecurity”, according to the El Tecolote article. But how many of their families will be willing and able to deal with the bureaucracy around the program in exchange for the dubious priviliege of accessing a mattress on the floor of a school gym when needed? That remains to be seen.

    But let there be no confusion on this point: Letting homeless people sleep in a government school at night, which school board member Mark Sanchez noted is probably a first in the country, is not the problem, just as the problem with California’s Proposition 64 was never the idea of legalizing cannabis – as with Prop. 64, the problem is all the government BS that has come with it.

    Now that it has been expanded, if not yet reframed, will this comi-tragic effort manage to morph into something both useful and reasonable, as those who conceived it presumably intended, or will their good intentions be once again defeated by the nature of government, its non-profit patronage system, and the Lennon Rule* as the program matures into an even larger and more wasteful boondoggle?

    Stay tuned…

    *”Everything the government touches turns to shit.”
    – John Lennon