Organized Labor

The inevitable increase in California’s population will have to be absorbed somewhere. Many environmentalists agree that development close to jobs and public transit will accommodate this increase with the least cost to the environment. Older suburbs well-served by public transit can take some of the increase. San Francisco has by far the closest concentration of jobs and of public transit in the Bay Area, however. Even though densely populated by American standards, at 17,323 inhabitants per square mile, the City is not densely populated by European standards. The population density of Paris proper, for example, is 65,700 inhabitants per square mile, almost four times higher. No one has ever accused Paris of being unlivable, even while Parisians have been called insufferable. San Francisco can and must grow, as this column has argued before.

The Planning Department’s “2009 Draft Housing Element” estimates that 43,400 units of housing can be built as infill under existing zoning. 16,000 more can be built on vacant or near-vacant land. With proposed new zoning, an additional 27,844 units can be built.

But can we live there?

From 1999 to 2006, the Planning Department report says that the City met 82.8% of its “very low income” housing goals, 52.4% of its “low income” housing goals, and 12.4% of its “moderate” housing goals. It is to this last, most underserved category, defined as 80% to 120% of median income, that most Building Trades workers belong in an ordinary year of work. This is a category that receives no public subsidies. It was a category ignored by Supervisor Chris Daly in his proposals to require at Hunters Point and Treasure Island that one half of units be for low and very low income residents.

Also from 1999 to 2006, the City met 153.4% of its “market-rate” housing goals – that is, for households at more than 120% of median income. Much of our work was in production of this excess of market-rate housing.

We in the Trades are therefore priced out of what we build at both ends. A 2000 San Francisco Human Rights Commission study of construction union workforce composition showed the results of this. In almost all locals the proportion of apprentices living in San Francisco was higher than that of journeylevel members. In the case of Carpenters Local 22, the proportion of apprentices living in the City more than doubled that of journeylevel members – a difference that persists today, according to Local 22 officials. This demonstrates statistically what most of us knew anecdotally already: We bring San Franciscans into our trades, the best alternative in the City for a middle class living in a blue collar, only to see them move to distant suburbs when they are at the peak of their careers and want to buy homes.

This continual transformation of City residents into suburban commuters has led to charges that we are “commuter unions.” Our work on an excess of market-rate housing has simultaneously brought charges that we are “gentrifying unions.”

All this while we are simply trying to make a living.

Unfortunately it is never enough simply to try to make a living. We may not be responsible for the system in which we work, but we do have some capacity to help change it. Unions can, should, and do fulfill a role of social activism.

Some forms of this activism present practical difficulties for the Trades. “Social activism” comes easier to the lips of those who call for it than to the bodies of workers exhausted after a day or a week of hard physical labor, and the rallies so favored by activists are harder to inhabit with exiles to scattered suburbs.

But the real difficulty for us where the problem of housing in San Francisco is concerned is that there is as yet no functional alternative to the market-based system of housing production. Calvin Welch, a housing activist in San Francisco, argued passionately but rationally at a recent Labor Council “teach in” for major Federal investment in affordable housing. The Federal government is the one public entity with real capacity for such investment, but it has other demands at present on its resources, and while political will for investment might eventually be built up at the Federal level, this will not happen in the short term. We could happily support an effort to build that will, if our own genuine needs for affordable housing were acknowledged in the effort. What do we build, how do we live in the meantime?

San Francisco must grow. It must house low-paid service workers, but it must also house us, because it will need us to grow. It needs to house those we bring into our ranks and even to accommodate a return of our members from the suburbs. Where is the political champion of workers who will understand the complexity of need and opportunity we present? Where is the politician who does not want us as just an ally of market-rate developers, on the one hand, or repudiate us as just an ally of market-rate developers, on the other? Where is the politician willing to fight the shortcomings of market-rate development without dismissing us as mere collateral damage in that fight? Where is the politician who can reject the intellectual laziness that stereotypes us as “commuter unions” or “gentrifying unions” and work with us in the cause of building a San Francisco that is home to a thriving working class?

Show us that politician. Even exhausted, we’ll rally for that politician and that cause.