It all started last month, outside the construction site at First and Mission where the new Transbay terminal and building is being built. I saw two police officers: one grabbing the closed end of a sleeping bag while the other one grabbed a man with his baton around the man’s neck, pulling him out of the sleeping bag. This is a violation of their protocol. Being that I made a treaty with my wife since I got married not to fight with police officers, I did not get involved in an altercation. The police officer just waved at me and said, “Pops, go right by.”
This police activity is a front to a formerly neutral zone between homeless people and police officers. For years, homeless people were allowed to sleep in the old Transbay terminal until it closed at 2 in the morning. That all stopped when a redevelopment agency got the property and began construction on the site. The new building on the earthquake prone landfill site is not just a normal skyscraper; it will be a 1,000 foot glass and steel disaster. They had to go down 300 feet to hit bedrock with the piledriving in order to anchor the building. When finished, this will not only be a huge structure inside, but a palace for the rich in the basement as well. The high speed rail train that goes 200 miles an hour will have a station there, as one of the stops from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It will also serve caltrains and other bus companies for commuters to bring them back to their million dollar homes down the peninsula. The tower will be home to new businesses that will be nothing but headaches to the low-income residents of our city. As Google does not give any support to our city, I don’t expect that these people will support us either.
Senate bill 122 would keep exclusionary housing, which means one low income housing unit would be built for every five luxury units. Low income units are defined as 30% of area income medium, which in San Francisco is $100,000 per year. The below market housing units would be affordable to seniors on social security or anybody on SSI or on minimum wage. SB122 was passed by the state senate and assembly but vetoed by our governor, with no logical explanation.
The governor also dismantled all the redevelopment agencies that protected low income housing in the state of California.
Presently we are 200% oversupplied supplied with upper income housing, and 300% undersupplied on low income housing. Some people have to wait 10 years to be placed in low income housing (excluding SROs) in San Francisco.
The recent actions of the governor will only make this problem worse. Why do we have 30,000 vacant units, and only 10,000 homeless people? That’s enough to put one person in each house and leave 2/3 of the units vacant. In some countries, after a unit is vacant for two years, they give a property to citizens that want or need it. The Netherlands used this method of housing people until two years ago, but other countries still do it.
This problem is not only in San Francisco. Presently my friend in Seattle lives in a building that was recently sold. She was told by the new owners in a letter that her unit was already rented, so she faces the threat of eviction.
We’ll keep having problems until somebody fixes the homeless issue and we a put a moratorium on high-end housing until all low income housing can be built in the United States, and corporations pay their fair share of taxes. Ed Lee made a deal with and Twitter, the new high tech corporation in the Soma district, so they do not have to pay property tax for ten years. Proposition 13 was a measure that the voters passed to save people’s housing, but the people that got the most benefit were corporations whose property taxes also didn’t go up. Prop 13 should be amended to exclude corporations, and corporate citizenship should be abolished.