Organized Labor

In all the rhetoric, cross-accusations, and general noise over the June ballot’s Proposition F, Supervisor Chris Daly’s measure to impose a fifty percent “affordable” housing requirement on Lennar/BVHP’s project at Hunters Point and Candlestick Point, it has perhaps not been often enough noted that the measure represents part of a coherent vision for the future of San Francisco.

Lennar’s proposed project includes up to 10,000 units of housing, 400 acres of parks, open space, and recreation areas, 2,000,000 square feet of commercial space, reconstruction of the Alice Griffith public housing project, and a possible new stadium for the Forty-Niners. With a project labor agreement already in place for much of it, the project means years of work for us.

The project’s opponents have complained of Lennar’s early failures in the handling of asbestos-bearing dust raised by excavation in the native serpentinite underlying much of Hunters Point. They have claimed that the project will lead to gentrification of the adjacent neighborhoods. They have expressed disbelief that toxics left in parts of the site by its years as a Navy shipyard will ever be adequately cleaned up. They have pointed to Lennar’s financial troubles nationally and raised doubts about its ability actually to accomplish what it has proposed here. They have said that a small bridge Lennar has planned to cross the mouth of Yosemite Slough will damage the slough’s restoration.

There is reason to take all these points seriously, although some project opponents have not been able to resist pairing them with public accusations that proponents of the project – including myself – are sellouts to Lennar and worse. Lennar’s work on the project should indeed be scrutinized on an ongoing basis, as should that of any developer on so large a project, and the years ahead will provide numerous opportunities for this in the many public approval processes through which phases of the project must still pass.

The project is nonetheless good, not just for us, but for the City. Some have quibbled over just how many jobs it will bring after ours are done, but no one can doubt it will bring thousands. Negotiations between Lennar and the San Francisco Labor Council in progress as of this writing should assure that union organizing of those jobs will have a fair opportunity. If the Forty-Niners decide to stay, well and good; if they decide to leave, bon voyage, and the stadium site will have other and maybe better economic uses. The City needs the proposed housing, and this column has argued earlier that it is far better for the environment to build housing in the City than in far-flung suburbs and exurbs. By law, much of this housing will already be “affordable.” The negotiations with the Labor Council may make more of it so.

But not fifty percent. Lennar has claimed that the fifty percent requirement imposed by Proposition F will kill the project. Every other developer I have questioned on this – including one rumored by some project opponents to be interested in taking over the project even under that very requirement – has agreed with Lennar. No project opponent I have questioned has been able to point to any private development here or elsewhere that has been able to achieve such a level of affordable housing without public subsidy.

Supervisor Daly has been paraphrased in the San Francisco Business Times as saying that he doesn’t care if Proposition F chases Lennar away; he believes that the City should take the project over. The Business Times quoted him: “Whether we can build this much affordable housing is a matter of political wills and not spreadsheets.” Daly has put forth unsuccessfully a measure at the Board of Supervisors to require that fifty percent of housing in future development at Treasure Island also be “affordable.” He has convinced the Board to put a measure on the November ballot to set aside a portion of the City’s general fund every year to finance “affordable” housing. He has straightforwardly asked for a “new New Deal.”

The coherent vision that emerges from these actions sees Hunters Point, Candlestick Point, Treasure Island, and some of the industrial lands of the “Eastern Neighborhoods” – so titled by the Planning Department – as the last large areas of San Francisco in which the question of what classes of people should live in the City can be addressed in a broadly effective way, especially now that the shape of development in Mission Bay is a settled question. Daly’s vision seeks to claim a larger place for the poor and the lower middle class. It wants to accomplish this through more public spending on housing. To be effective, that spending would have to be considerable.

In and of itself this vision would not be bad at all for the Building Trades, if the definition of “affordable” were expanded to slightly higher income levels so that our members were not restricted from living in the very homes they were building. Its success, however, is made highly unlikely by a variety of factors.

It is first not just a matter of “political will,” but of electoral will. Various measures to finance housing have come before the City’s voters in recent years. All have failed at the ballot box. Nothing indicates that anything will be different this November, given the current woes of the City budget and the threat of constricted services they already present. Even if we accept the argument that a full-out effort by other political leaders might convince voters to support more City expenditures on housing, this effort is unlikely, and will remain unlikely no matter how races for the Board of Supervisors go in November.

Moreover, the analogy Supervisor Daly suggests with Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” breaks down under scrutiny. The original New Deal was a response to the desperation of the Great Depression. Following the economic theories of the English economist John Maynard Keynes, it employed deficit spending on public works as a “pump primer” for the capitalist economy. This deficit spending was not intended as a permanent feature of the Federal budget, but as a temporary expedient until the private economy had recovered and could itself provide adequate employment and goods. Business may not have liked Roosevelt’s measures, but during the infancy of globalization moving abroad was not a ready alternative. Republicans may have despised the measures, but so much of the electorate was in desperate straits that it would gladly support Roosevelt’s new approach over the old and failed Republican reliance on “the market” to cure its own economic ills; and in fact the New Deal may have helped the country avoid what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had believed was unavoidable in capitalist economies, a level of desperation so deep and widespread that the mass of working men and women would feel they had nothing to lose and everything to gain by revolution.

The City charter forbids deficit spending. New spending on housing would have to come either at the expense of existing programs or from new taxes or fees. We might identify some City programs we could well live without, but their elimination would not amount to enough to finance truly effective spending on housing, and right now we are looking at reductions to those very programs as a way to prevent layoffs, furloughs, or pay cuts to the City’s public workforce. Where new taxes or fees fall on the public, they will face resistance and possible defeat at the ballot box. Where they fall on businesses, these will not see the seven-by-seven mile boundaries of San Francisco as nearly as much a barrier to flight as were the borders of the United States in the nineteen-thirties

And although many San Francisco families may now be in desperate straits, unemployment in the City is relatively low, and desperation is certainly not as deep or widespread as in the nineteen-thirties.
If Proposition F passes now, it will simply kill the project at Hunters Point and Candlestick Point, with no good hope of an alternative for years to come.

Things may change over time. Lennar may fold under its financial strains or back out of the project on its own. The proponents of greater public spending on housing may assemble a large enough coalition to make the taxes and fees to support it possible. Local businesses may come to see broader housing affordability as important enough to their own interests that they will contribute to its support.
Heck, we may even see the Revolution someday.
Meanwhile we have to eat.


Vote NO on Proposition F.