The Largest Gated Community in the Country

by Carol Harvey, Street Spirit/ POOR Magazine October 2002

"Some of our opponents are pretty smart - smart enough to figure out that if you change who lives here, you change
who votes here, thus you can change the politics." - Chris Daly, S.F. Supervisor, D6

I stood holding groceries in the parking lot of the California-Fillmore Pacific Heights Molly Stone’s. I was
chatting with a man who was gripping a clipboard and fashionably dressed in a green L.L. Bean jacket. He was
collecting signatures for Care Not Cash, the homeless stipend reduction proposal.

A blonde woman in a gray coat buttonholed me, assuming I too was a petitioner. Inches from my eyes, her intense
stare pinned me in place. She angrily announced, “On my low teacher’s salary, I can’t afford a house in San
Francisco. My only choice is to turn my apartment into a condo. I want HOPE.”

She turned abruptly and marched up the ramp into the store. Blind with high emotion, she assumed erroneously that
I was opposing HOPE, the condo conversion Prop. No time to respond. All I could give her was my respectful
attention. Then she was gone.

I turned to Mr. L. L. Bean. "I gather you are also getting signatures for HOPE, and she knew that?"

"Yes," he said.

"I've just been tarred (and feathered) with the same brush," I said.

My non-connection with HOPE was not clear to her, but the connection between
HOPE and Care Not Cash became crystal clear to me. 'There are a lot of people like her,' I thought. 'What will
happen when she, and they, learn the truth?'

So, Mystery woman who hopes to buy a home. I am writing this for you.'

The most magical, integrated and cosmopolitan population on the North American continent

Calvin Welch, an affordable housing expert from the San Francisco Information
Clearinghouse, wrote in May 2001, "San Francisco is a profoundly immigrant City with wave after wave of economic,
ethnic, racial, cultural, political and sexual immigrants washing over each successive wave, building the most
magical, integrated and cosmopolitan population on the North American continent... That's the San Francisco dream."

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/id236.htm

That dream began eroding when a high-rise boom changed the economy of San
Francisco in the 1970s. Blue-collar union jobs in shipping, warehousing, and manufacturing were replaced by
"new-collar" clerical, business support, and retailing jobs, "moving low-income people of color out of San Francisco
to make space" for corporate offices. The first wave of gentrification in the 1980s, then a second wave during the
1990s dot-com boom, roared in like tsunamis, leaving higher and higher rents in their wakes.

"The cumulative effect of these forces has been to make the stock of existing rental housing in San Francisco
ground zero for attack after attack," Welch wrote. "Desperation grips a wide section of the middle class, once content
as tenants, to transform their current unstable living situation and seek out the supposed security of home ownership
no matter what the social cost.

"The latest desperate round in this battle of property owners against renters and the poor is the deceptively named
HOPE proposal, championed by conservative S.F. Supervisor Tony Hall on the November ballot. HOPE allows a new
category of apparently tenant-initiated condo conversions, removes the 200-unit-per-year limit, and eliminates
restrictions on building size.

Currently, in a building with more than six units, landlords can't convert to condos. Tenants are protected by rent
control and have relatively secure housing. HOPE would remove those restrictions and put all tenants at risk of condo
conversion evictions, unprotected by rent control, with landlords selling off units one by one. Landlords can get 25
percent of the tenants to sign a paper saying, "I want to buy my unit." Once signed, the tenant can't rescind it.
Landlords can easily collect signatures, pay tenants to sign, and include themselves if they live in the building. If
you move out, your signature still counts.

San Francisco's super rich paid the Committee on Jobs to fund twin ballot initiatives to accomplish their ends.
Using mayoral contenders Gavin Newsom and Tony Hall to front the Care Not Cash and HOPE proposals, they play on the
two deepest fears of voters: "Will I lose my home? Will I end up on the street?"

Newsom, the voice of Care Not Cash, "guarantees" phantom services for the lost
souls holding cups outside Mollie Stone's, an upscale supermarket in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights. Tony Hall, the
mouthpiece of HOPE, promises a "Home Ownership Program for Everyone." The super rich hope that fear and prejudice will
influence voters so that San Francisco voting blocs will be changed and rearranged with populations more amenable to
their interests.

The Strategy of the Super Rich

Sharon Stone, Danny Glover, Madeline Albright (who comes to visit her daughter and buy antiques), and others at
stratospheric socioeconomic heights mingle and shop with the less rich and famous at Mollie Stone's. Donald and Doris
Fisher of the Gap with their $2.1 billion, reside in a Pacific Heights high rise three blocks away. Close by, the
family mansion of oil tycoon Gordon Getty, worth another $2.1 billion, overlooks the Bay from Pacific Avenue.

Other top ten San Francisco billionaires who shop at upscale stores are Robert
Goldman of Levi Strauss ($1.5 billion); Stephen and Riley Bechtel ($3.5 billion each); Susan Buffett of Berkshire
Hathaway ($2.4 billion); Robert Niafy, movie theaters ($1.7 billion); George Roberts, leveraged buyouts ($1.4.
billion). Housing activists say the super rich have an agenda. And they have hired the Committee on Jobs to carry it
out.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/1...
20251.DTL

Some San Franciscans with world-class wealth have multinational corporate connections that stretch to New York and
circle the globe. That these local big fish swim in national and international high seas becomes evident upon looking
at the New York City Doe Fund Board, the group Gavin Newsom visited in the spring of 2002 to investigate their Ready,
Willing, and Able program to get homeless people off the streets of New York.

Newsom is the new forelocked stallion in the Getty-Burton stable. He is backed
by their vast wealth and the considerable funding of the Committee on Jobs. He owns wineries and restaurants with
Gordon Getty's son.

The New York homeless activist, Anthony Williams, describes the Doe Fund as
one millionaire's (McDonald's) collusion with another millionaire (Giuliani's) to feed the voting public a program
which appears to get the homeless off the street, but simply exploits their work or runs them out of town.

Anthony Williams, is co-founder of "Picture The Homeless," which organizes unsheltered people on the streets of New
York.

http://www.gvny.com/columns/lamb/lamb01-11-02.html

In Spring 2002, Williams told me that RWA pays their laborers $5.50 an hour for jobs like “sweeping and bagging
garbage,” working next to city employees earning “quadruple for the same work. People untrained for living wage
employment later recycle back into poverty.”

http://www.poormagazine.com/index.cfm?L1=news&story=726

In the same way, Care Not Cash would reduce the wages of homeless San Francisco workfare street sweepers to $1.84
an hour while their DPW counterparts earn many times as much.

The Doe Fund's corporate and foundation sponsors include: Bloomberg News,
Bloomingdale's, Business Week, Canon, Chase Manhattan, CIBC World Markets, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Fannie Mae
Foundation, Forbes, Inc., Goldman Sachs, Kiplinger Foundation, Lehman Brothers, Newsweek, New York Junior League, New
York Times, People Magazine, Reader's Digest Association, Soloman Smith Barney, Charles Schwab, Time Inc., Toyota,
U.S. News & World Report, World Bank.

http://www.doe.org/

The Doe Fund website displays photos of the "generous donors" of their exclusively male Caucasian 11-member board.
Global banking and financing representative, Mike Gantcher, Director of Investments Middle Market Group, CIBC World
Markets, stands next to his blonde wife, Christina. ." All 'generous donors,’ their family members, and RWA staff are
repeatedly and fully identified under several photos that omit the names of all seven anonymous smiling homeless
partygoers standing beside them. RWA staff are named. RWA participants are not. “Generous Donors” are white. RWA
staff and participants are people of color. (Click on the invitation to view "two participants in the women's
program," and five "RWA trainees enjoying themselves at the University Club.) "The homeless," all people of color,
are merged into an undifferentiated mass of insignificant nonentities in these RWA photos.

http://www.doe.org/events/donors/

Other board members represent chemicals and biogenetic foods, Manhattan real
estate, media conglomerates, venture capital and corporate finance, and global
investment bankers like Citigroup.

CHEMICALS/ AGRIBUSINESS: Timothy P. Andree, Senior Vice President of Communications; BASF world’s largest chemical
company, agribusiness (biogenetic foods).

REAL ESTATE: Jeff T. Blau, President, The Related Companies, LP; Real estate; develops manages and finances “the
most desirable residences in New York City,” ”the world’s finest real estate developments.”

PUBLISHING: Richard Burgheim, Consulting Editor, Time, Inc.

VENTURE CAPITAL: P. Benjamin Grosscup, Senior Vice President, Munn, Bernhard & Associates, Inc.; investment
management company, corporate finance.

GLOBAL INVESTMENTS: Jon Harris, Alternative Investment Management; Global Investors who “wish to be part of the
global network;” sponsoring members: Citigroup; CIS, Euronext, Fortis.

MANHATTAN REAL ESTATE: Peter Resnick, Managing Director, Jack Resnick & Sons, Inc.

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS IN SILICON VALLEY/ CALIFORNIA COMPUTERS AND INTEGRATED CIRCUITS: Craig Lucas, General
Partner, Zimmer-Lucas Partners LLC.

Board member Leslie Hawke has Hollywood and Eastern European connections. Her son is actor Ethan Hawke, married to
Uma Thurman. Her People Magazine story, "Mother On A Mission," recounts how she left the boredom of her life to join
the Peace Corps in Bacau, Romania, after John F. Kennedy, Jr's plane crash. Using her connections on the Doe Fund
Board, she set the mothers of gypsy beggar children to work in a Bacau Ready, Willing, and Able program. Perhaps
fellow board members from the corporate media like Richard Burgheim, Consulting Editor, Time, Inc., which publish
People magazine, made possible the presentation of this puff piece.

http://www.doe.org/news/articles/

Doe Fund board member Craig Lucas, of Zimmer-Lucas Partners, invests in
biopharmaceutical and computer firms in Tustin, Costa Mesa, Sunnyvale, and Richmond, which develop high-density
electronics, miniature cameras, and integrated circuits. And so we come full circle around the globe and back to
California.

http://www.doe.org/about/board.cfm

With so many high-powered business interests focused on homeless people, it
raises speculation as to why they haven't been rescued from the streets long ago
to affordable homes of their own.

The Broken Windows Theory

The conservative social policies of the super rich, represented by Newsom in San Francisco, are made clear by a
look at the ideas of the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank in New York City. Anthony Williams explains,
"During the Dinkins Administration, the Manhattan Institute developed the Broken Windows theory, a way to deal with
social ills which says, 'If you clean the dirt, the homeless will be swept out of sight, out of mind' - like shards of
glass from a storefront window after a riot.

"In his keynote address at the 1999 Livable Cities Conference in Washington, D.C., Giuliani said, "The Broken
Windows theory, probably our first big success... is being applied in cities across the country."

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cb_17.htm

Indeed. Besides Bacau, Romania, the RWA program has expanded to Harlem, Jersey City, and Philadelphia. What a coup
for Newsom if he can bring it to San Francisco!

Under Giuliani, the NYPD became a repressive force acting out the Manhattan
Institute's Broken Windows agenda. After a thief attacked a woman named Nicole
Barrett, and was falsely labeled homeless, Giuliani decided "to get those crazies off the street." Since 1999, police
hostility has been directed at homeless people for quality of life crimes such as sleeping, loitering, urinating,
obstructing benches. Giuliani claims the homeless have disappeared from Manhattan. Activist Anthony Williams says
they are hiding in plain sight, running in terror from the police and possible incarceration in shelters and upstate
prisons. Lately, however, homeless people are re-emerging from Manhattan shadows. Giuliani is gone.

Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash resembles the Manhattan Institute's Broken Windows theory. Homeless activists insist
the cash-reduction plan is void of compassionate caring services. They say the real agenda is to sweep the homeless
out of the city by making it too expensive to live here on $1.84 an hour, the workfare stipend reduction to be
presented to voters in November. Newsom's trip to The Big Apple to check out McDonald's Doe-funded Ready, Willing,
and Able program exposed the Getty-Burton New York connections.

Researching the right-wing Manhattan Institute and Giuliani's approval of McDonald's attempts to use the homeless
to "sweep" New York City clean, exposes the agenda of the equally right-wing San Francisco super rich to turn San
Francisco into a little Manhattan owned by the top ten percent of extremely wealthy people. They believe in the
Manhattan Institute studies that have claimed that discipline and punishment, not homes, are the solutions to
homelessness.

As Welch puts it that homeless and lower-income tenants alike are to be treated as supplicants, not full citizens
of the community. These victims, like newly jobless dot-commers, fall into a gap between lowered wages and soaring
rents created by the super rich, who victimize and judge them unworthy of having their fall broken by a social safety
net.

Welch called HOPE "a sugar-coated poison pill."

Welch and S.F. Tenant Union Director Ted Gullicksen concur that the super rich
wish to change the dream of the multicultural melting pot in which "separate and distinct immigrant populations can
first meet and settle and then mingle and mutate" in a city in which housing is as flexible as the population" -
meaning "both apartments and homes."

Said Welch, "Land use is the essence of politics in San Francisco."

Incredibly, Welch and Gullicksen say that the San Francisco super rich want this seven-by-seven-mile city for
themselves, transforming the City into the exclusive preserve of the affluent. Welch said, "Their definition of
multiculturalism is where you can go to any restaurant featuring a variety of the world's cuisines." They plan to use
HOPE to run the tenant population out of rental spaces in the City and change San Francisco voting patterns. They have
even figured out how many years this will take.

Just as they plan to use Care Not Cash to make homeless people disappear by
attrition or death, they have created HOPE as a condo-conversion scheme to control who lives here and who works here,
and to transform San Francisco to a City of the Rich in 25 years or less.

Committee On Jobs

Welch reported that he has heard Nathan Nayman say as much. Nayman is the executive director of the Committee on
Jobs, the organization funded by the San Francisco super rich and big businesses to lobby for their interests at City
Hall. Nayman and Mark Mosher, the main lobbyist for the Committee on Jobs, represent the interests of the likes of
The Gap's Don Fisher, Walter Shorenstein, Levi Strauss, Macy's, Bank of America, and various presidents and CEOs of
big corporations. Every high rise in the financial district is a member of the Committee on Jobs, as is every big
landlord in the city. The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), representing big commercial and residential
landlords, is notorious for low wages and for fighting tenant initiatives. "BOMA always puts a big chunk of money
against anything tenants put on the ballot," said Gullicksen.

According to Welch, the enormous effort currently under way by the Committee on Jobs, BOMA, the Golden Gate
Restaurant Association, and the hotel owners to get HOPE on the November 2002 ballot is explained by the November 2000
election of the new district-based Board of Supervisors. This election caused a major shift in political power in San
Francisco, dramatically reducing the influence of business elements.

"Corporate San Francisco's agenda is to remove the disparate, unruly, incredibly diverse, populist culture that has
given San Francisco much of its flavor and political history in the last 50 years," said Welch. These corporate
interests need the power of the Board of Supervisors to remove the "economically irrelevant" population from San
Francisco and replace it with businesses and affluent residents.

It is troublesome to Corporate San Francisco that the Board of Supervisors can
approve or disapprove million-dollar developments, and that they must go through
an election process that can be hijacked by this cacophonous crowd. Because the big-business interests lost in 2000,
they now realize they can't defeat each supervisor in their districts. Welch has actually heard Nathan Nayman say,
"What we're going to have to do is change the San Francisco voter."

Gullicksen confirmed Welch's view that "the reason the Committee on Jobs are the ones putting all their funding
money, a million dollars, on Proposition R, the HOPE initiative, is that they know they are stuck with district
elections, and initiatives that pass, and all they have left is to change the population of the voters. Their goal is
to displace and get rid of all the low- and moderate-income tenants in the City."

Commented Welch, "Care Not Cash tries to transform San Francisco by altering the way it provides services to poor
people. HOPE would dramatically increase the potential for renter households in rent-controlled apartments to be
displaced by people with more money. The super rich/ Nayman /Committee on Jobs position is that, ‘If we want to
change the politics of this Board of Supervisors, we have to first remove their electoral base. We do that by going
after rent control and social services.’

From this point of view, Chris Daly is supervisor because nonprofit service providers and low-income tenants in
rent-controlled buildings voted for Chris. Since we can't beat Chris with somebody else, we've got to remove his
electoral base. "The real connection between Care Not Cash and HOPE is precisely that both are aimed at changing the
City's electoral base by driving away low-income residents.

The essence of Care Not Cash is to break the solidarity and the equal footing between the person in need of a
social service and the person providing it. The
assumption behind Care Not Cash is that poor people are different because they
are needy; if they do not have money, they are not to be considered full citizens.

"That is the same line being touted by HOPE," said Welch. "There's this intense image of tenants as parasites." The
Committee on Jobs stokes the perception that
only homeowners give to communities and neighborhoods, and care about the future of our children.

Gullicksen agrees, saying, “Whenever Nancy Tucker, a landlord activist working for small property owners, or Joe
Capko, a tenant spokesperson for big landlords, have been at an event I attended, they look at me and the other
tenants there with absolute hate in their eyes. It's very odd."

"Welch said, "The vilification of tenants by the supporters of HOPE is really quite astounding. It is, in essence,
a denial of common San Franciscan citizenship." Their belief system is that if you're homeless, or if you're a
tenant, you're not a San Franciscan.

The Committee on Jobs is pumping up the emotion behind the reactionary
supporters of these initiatives.

HOPE seems to represent explicit class warfare. At the present legal limit of 200 condo conversions per year, it
would take many centuries to evict every San Francisco tenant. HOPE would allow landlords to evict tenants faster
because it increases the number from 200 to approximately 3,400 a year. That would enable property owners to sell off
the units to the rich, and San Francisco could be ethnically and economically cleansed.

"That's absolutely correct," stated Gullicksen. "In 25 years, this measure will get rid of half of the rental units
in the City. They will keep the 3,400 conversions. That's good enough. They don't have to get rid of every single
last tenant, just half of them. When you think of the massive change we are talking about - 25 years to completely
transform San Francisco into a city for the super rich - it's actually a very short time.”

Their sheer amount of money makes the Committee on Jobs formidable. Viewing their financial filings on the Ethics
website reveals a ‘bottomless pit of money.’ They paid a high price getting HOPE on the ballot, using paid signature
gatherers who earned $2.00 per signature and collected the bulk of them.

"But," said Gullicksen, "The Yes on R people fought the endorsement war part of the campaign, and lost. On August
21, 2002, the Central Committee for the
Democratic Party came out against HOPE."

So, the Committee on Jobs has gone a'courting by working on various interest
groups to subtly change their perceptions - Chinese voters in the Sunset/Richmond, select African-Americans with
business interests, the wealthy gay men of the Plan C. Board, the Fang's Examiner and editors Frank Gallagher and
Nancy Tucker, who has the double advantage to the Committee on Jobs of being an original member of the Small Property
Owners Association.

Welch explained, "The business community has courted the Chinese community as a natural ally... The Examiner, and
the Fang newspapers, including Asian Week, project the image of the Chinese as solidly middle class. Reading these
papers, one would not know that the overwhelming majority of Chinese people in San Francisco are tenants."

They have failed in their attempt to project the gay community as this upwardly
mobile, middle-class population with no political reason to make allies with people of color or environmentalists." A
look at voting patterns in the gay community reveals political support for common issues with lower-income people.

Supporters of HOPE and Care Not Cash, the Plan C Board of Directors is predominantly upper-middle-class gay men.
Plan C is of pivotal importance as a group that has narrowed its focus from sexual orientation to money. Thus, they
are able to support Tony Hall, a right-to-life proponent, in his class-war initiative, HOPE. Welch thinks that Sup.
Tom Ammiano must be full of consternation, wondering how it can be that, in the end, all politics is reduced to class
based on money.

The Committee on Jobs, along with Getty-Burton interests, appears to be using
both the Chronicle and the Examiner, with the Fang's blessing, to attack nonprofits like the Coalition on
Homelessness, which defends the rights of the homeless poor, and the Housing Rights Committee, which defends rent
control and the interests of low-income tenants.

Last fall, 2001, The Examiner hired Frank Gallagher, formerly employed by Solem and Associates, a public relations
firm that has represented landlords, developers, and PG&E. In an apparent attempt to get the Housing Rights Committee
defunded, Gallagher wrote articles suggesting the organization was misusing taxpayer money to work for ballot
initiatives favoring the interests of tenants.

(http://www.sfbg.com/36/43/news_housing.html )

According to Gullicksen, "The City did an audit and gave HRC a clean bill of health." A similar attack on the
Coalition on Homelessness has led to the loss of some of their funders.

The vociferous desperation in the fight to realize the dream of property ownership and control over San Francisco
housing stock is captured in the personality and behavior of one of the more colorful characters of the pro-landlord
forces: Nancy Tucker, founding member of the Small Property Owners Association. Tucker, who claims she has a 30-year
journalism career, mainly at the Army Times, edits the op-ed page for the Examiner, motivated by pure zeal. Housing
activists speculate she trades stories back and forth with Examiner columnist Frank Gallagher. Gallagher does hit
pieces on nonprofit agencies and progressive Supervisor Chris Daly. Nancy Tucker promotes HOPE.

Small property owners are landlords of buildings with two to four units, not impacted by HOPE. HOPE will impact
only the larger buildings. Gullicksen said he believes their difference with tenants on land-use issues is simply a
matter of "plain old conservative ideology." They want tenants gone. The SPOSF would vote conservatively on issues
like bonds and taxes as well as social issues.

Tucker has come to symbolize for me the high paranoia gripping San Franciscans who are searching for fool's gold in
a new rush to vote out rent control and convert their apartments to condos. A rent-controlled apartment would allow
them to save for a home, but when HOPE effectively repeals rent control, rents will skyrocket. The very wealthy know
that only they will be able to afford a space in San Francisco. The trick within a trick is that HOPE will do exactly
the opposite of what it says.

The SPOSF share with the super rich a vision of San Francisco as "the largest
gated community in the country." The Committee on Jobs promotes the SPOSF vision of San Francisco as a suburb with
suburban values, conservative fiscally and socially. Said Gullicksen, "People with lots of money. No homeless lying
on sidewalks. No poor people. Not even tenants. Just a nice place where you can raise your children" in a
freestanding house with a green yard and a picket fence.

Property owners are less inclined to vote for tax increases or bond measures. They vote against adequate funding
for homeless services or affordable housing, and in favor of measures that drive homeless people out of town because
their very existence brings down property values.

Tucker's career as a pro-landlord activist reveals a person obsessed with property rights and anger and hatred
towards marginalized groups she believes are stealing her little piece of San Francisco. This attitude is widely
shared by the pro-landlord forces trying to force low-income people out of the City altogether.

The case of Lola McKay shows the cruel extremes to which landlords will go in their vendetta against renters.
McKay, an 83-year-old woman, faced an Ellis Act eviction in the last days of her life. She received anonymous letters
saying, "Get the hell out," and "Go buy cat food if you can't afford rent." Greatly distressed, Lola showed these
letters to Raquel Fox, a lawyer for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, who participated many times in pickets in front of
Lola's house and knew the elderly tenant personally. Fox said she believes this trauma contributed to Lola McKay's
death just before she could be evicted.

McKay's fate shows the inhumanity of this effort to drive low-income people out of San Francisco. Care Not Cash
would reduce homeless GA recipients to abject poverty and misery. The HOPE initiative would result in the eviction of
countless renters. Paired together, these twin initiatives threaten to recreate Lola McKay's tragic fate a thousand
times over. And so, Blonde shopper who buttonholed me in Molly Stones parking lot adamantly claiming your right to a
home, I fervently hope you will not be one of these.