January 27, 2015
As we gear towards a new local and state government election season, it would appear that San Francisco Mayor Ed “the Liar” Lee may go unchallenged in his first re-election bid and what would be his final term as mayor.
Lee almost single-handedly sold the city hook line and sinker to high tech industry giants such as Google, Facebook, and Dropbox. He gave them huge tax cuts and other incentives, which inspired many of their employees to move closer to work, thus displacing many low income and people of color residents, some of whom were life-long.
Now it would appear that Lee is using typical political doublespeak to try to appeal to the very same people he helped displace. He is pretending to champion the cause of poverty and homelessness by throwing terms like “affordable housing” and “ending poverty” around, with hopes to increase his chance of winning the election. He even gave some homeless and poor folks a false sense of hope by making them feel included in Measure “C” back in 2010. Measure C was a ballot initiative that promised to use some hotel taxes to build affordable housing, housing he had no intention of having extended to homeless or other poor folks.
Two faced politicians are nothing new to San Francisco [or anywhere else in the world for that matter]. For instance Gavin Newsom, the current Lt. Gov. of California who is expected to run for governor at the end of Brown's term, hand-picked Lee as his successor on a platform of “ending homelessness as we know it.” Newsom set the ball in motion for the current housing crisis by appointing Lee to finish his final term as mayor, knowing full well what Lee had planned for the city as well as the poor population.
Getting back to the myth of affordable housing: it is necessary to point out why this term is doublespeak. To us low income folks who are not in the political arena or real estate industry, we hear the phrase affordable housing and think, “Oh great! Finally decent housing I can afford!” But politicians and developers actually mean “affordable
to the wealthy and middle class, but not to the poor.”
The people have cried for a transparent government for quite a while, but Ed Lee is transparent in a completely different way. As in, his lying is flat out obvious.