Organized Labor

We have seen the disaster piecemeal. We know that so many hundreds of journeymen are on the bench in this hall. We know that half the apprentices are unemployed in that local. Hours are down forty-something percent in this trust fund. Only half a dozen calls have come in one month from that window.

A Carpenter has lost her home. An Iron Worker is on the streets. Debt has smashed a Roofer’s marriage. And they are our sisters and brothers, and our friends.

As real as all this evidence of our distress is to us in the Trades, it often seems to have failed to arouse the concern of the politicians who represent us in San Francisco.

Now all the scraps of evidence have been forged into a sharpened set of numbers. We will see if San Francisco government pays attention.

At the quarterly meeting of its executive board early this month the California State Building and Construction Trades Council discussed statistics from the Construction Industry Research Board comparing dollar volume of construction the first ten months of this year and last in localities across the state.

From January through October of 2008 permits were issued in San Francisco for 2060 new residential units. In the same period in 2009, 139 permits were issued, for a reduction of almost 93% in number of residential units under construction.

Permit valuation for all private construction in the City went from $1,744,699,000 in the first ten months of 2008 to $669,212,000 in 2009, a reduction of almost 62%.

Construction contracts and starts for public buildings in San Francisco went from $601,791,000 in 2008 to $243,235,000, a reduction of about 60%.

Heavy civil construction actually increased in the City in the same time span, from $180,731,000 to $238,167,000, a rise of about 32%, but in an absolute amount that was insignificant relative to what had been lost in other sectors.

Overall, combining private and public construction, total volume went from $2,527,221,000 to $1,150,614,000, a drop of more than 54%. Given the different methods of valuing public and private sector construction, this combination cannot give an exact picture. The scale of our loss is nonetheless clear.

Also clear is the role that private sector construction plays in San Francisco’s economy and in providing us work. We have always claimed that it is more important than public sector construction. The snapshot from 2008 shows it roughly twice as important. Its collapse in 2009 is most of our hurt.

The start of three new major public buildings – the seismically sound wing of San Francisco General Hospital, the Public Utilities Commission headquarters on Golden Gate Avenue, and the Chinatown/North Beach campus of City College – will be joined before year’s end by the retrofit of the old Federal Building at 50 United Nations Plaza, which has “stimulus” funding. These will help us, but before they begin to make up for the loss of private sector work they will have to reverse the drop in public building.

School District work will continue to help in 2010 as it did in 2009, but at about the same pace. The same is true for the Public Utilities Commission’s water system work; most of that work has always been planned for parts of the system outside the City.

The construction of a new Doyle Drive will certainly help, as well, but not at all for several subcrafts.

In the private sector, the Lowes on Bayshore has started work. We will also put a new Exploratorium on the Embarcadero. Lennar will start vertical construction at Hunters Point. But a big box tilt-up with precast garage, the retrofit of a pier shed, and a residential project that is sure to be slow-paced until the new homes market returns will not nearly make up for the halt to so many projects on Rincon Hill and in the South of Market, for the evaporation of so much tenant improvement work in downtown, the Financial District, and shopping areas, and for the slowing of the development of Mission Bay.

The private sector will not recover fully until credit loosens and the demand for homes and for office leases increases. This won’t happen soon. Even so, some other private sector projects can happen. We need them.

The office building that Hines had proposed for 110 the Embarcadero might have been one of these, even in a down office market, and even with Hines’s recent tactical declaration of bankruptcy on other properties. Hines remains in the development business, and the location and architectural prominence of the building might have brought high end leases to it even while leases were going away from other buildings. The Board of Supervisors, though, ignored our pleas for jobs and rejected the project’s environmental documents, delaying it for months, if not killing it. A recent call of mine to Hines to inquire about the project’s status went unanswered.

The apartment building proposed by Portland Pacific for 430 Main Street might yet be one of these. The Board of Supervisors rejected its environmental documents as well. The developer is apparently trying to repair the documents to make them more acceptable.

Many both in and out of the Trades see something other than environmental concerns in these rejections. Developers commonly overreach. Projects always excite opposition. Add these two ingredients to a Board of Supervisors for whose “progressive” majority development will always pose problems and one of whose most forceful members, Chris Daly, has come to see us as the Enemy, and the mix that results is weak broth for us.

One ingredient could much improve the broth: Supervisors who will seize hold of the inevitable controversies surrounding projects and work through them to move project sponsors and opponents closer. This could certainly have been done with 110 the Embarcadero. It might yet be possible with 430 Main. It might work with projects at 8 Washington and 555 Washington. It should work, it needs to work with California Pacific Medical Center’s projects at its Cathedral Hill, St. Luke’s, and Davies campuses.

We always talk of Building Trades jobs when we appear before public bodies. As real as our needs may be, the risk we run with this is to inure commissioners and elected officials to what we are saying. One Supervisor was recently quoted to me as telling a project sponsor that he was tired of hearing about Building Trades jobs.

Fine; be tired of hearing about our jobs. Hear instead about well over a billion dollars lost from San Francisco’s economy.
Then step into the kitchen and get to work.