Issue 9

It will take at least seven years to secure older wood buildings dangerously perched above windows or garages. Meanwhile, offi cials aren’t anxious to

say where they all are. PAGES B1-B5

EARTHQUAKE RETROFIT DELAYSLEAVE THOUSANDS AT RISK

S A N F R A N C I S C O

PUBLIC PRESSS A N F R A N C I S C O

PUBLIC PRESS

HOMELESS MAKE OWN ARCHITECTURE IN MARGINSPhoto essay: Life on the street requires wits, design sense PAGE A6

CIVICS

FREE LIFELONG LEARNING CLASSES MAY BE VICTIM OF CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO’S BUDGET WOES PAGE A3

FOOD BANK RELYING ON LOCAL DONORS AFTER MISSING OUT ON FEDERAL FUNDS PAGE A3

ASIAN-AMERICANS ARE FLEXING POLITICAL MUSCLE LIKE NEVER BEFORE BY SEEKING ELECTIVE OFFICE PAGE A4

NOT ALL THINK LOSING A PARKING LOT FOR A PARK WOULD BE A GOOD SWAP PAGE A4

CROSSWORD PUZZLE PAGE A4

STREET

THE CURTAIN IS GOING UP ON A NEW PLAN TO REVAMP LONG-DERELICT ALEXANDRIA THEATER INTO SHOPS, APARTMENTS PAGE A5

FRUSTRATION OVER SAN FRANCISCO TAXICABS AND TRANSIT OPTIONS GIVING A BOOST TO LOCAL RIDESHARING PAGE A5

HOMELESS PEOPLE IN SAN FRANCISCO SPEAK OUT ABOUT CHALLENGES THEY FACE DAILY AND CITY POLICY PAGE A5

PHOTO ESSAY: HOMELESS PEOPLE CARVE OUT SPACES OF THEIR OWN PAGE A6

GREEN

YOU CAN FILL UP YOUR GAS TANK IN THE BAY AREA WITH FUEL MADE FROM ALGAE — BUT SHOULD YOU? PAGE A7

RESTORED MARSHY AREAS NEAR HUNTERS POINT NOW PROVIDING HABITAT FOR PLANTS AND ANIMALS PAGE A7

HANDS-ON WORK REQUIRED FOR SAN FRANCISCO’S GOAL — KEEPING GARBAGE OUT OF LANDFILLS PAGE A8

NEW NETWORK OF SENSORS QUANTIFIES THE AMOUNT OF GREENHOUSE GASES IN THE ATMOSPHERE PAGE A8

BRACING FOR THE BIG ONE

SAN FRANCISCO LAGS BEHIND OTHER CITIES IN PURSUING EARTHQUAKE RETROFITS FOR CERTAIN BUILDINGS PAGE B1

WHAT KINDS OF BUILDINGS ARE AT RISK, AND WHY PAGE B2

WHAT SHOULD YOU HAVE IN YOUR EARTHQUAKE PREPAREDNESS KIT? PAGE B3

IS YOUR HOME ON CITY’S LIST OF POTENTIAL PROBLEM STRUCTURES? PAGE B4

PROPERTY OWNERS JOCKEY FOR LAST PLACE IN RETROFIT ORDER B5

JUSTICE

JOURNALIST SHANE BAUER, WHO SPENT MONTHS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN IRAN, DECRIES CALIFORNIA’S VERSION PAGE B6

SAN FRANCISCO DISTRICT ATTORNEY TO RE-EXAMINE CITY’S LOW RATE OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE PROSECUTIONS PAGE B6

NEIGHBORHOOD NEWS: TIMID AUTO BURGLARY VICTIMS; RISING PARCEL THEFTS; AN OVERNIGHT PARKING BAN PAGE B6

POLICE TOLD THAT ALL RESIDENTS, INCLUDING THOSE IN SRO HOTELS, HAVE SAME PRIVACY RIGHTS PAGE B7

CIVIL LIBERTIES GROUPS CONCERNED ABOUT WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY THAT CAN DETERMINE USERS’ WHEREABOUTS PAGE B7

ECONOMY

PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING REPORTER DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: HOW THE STATE IS HELPING PG&E INCREASE ITS PROFITS PAGE B8

$ 1.00

ISSUE 9 WINTER 2012-2013

S

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independent

in-depthnonprofit

MEGAINDEX

SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG

p g g , ffisay where tthey all are. PAGEG S B1-B5

BRACING FOR THE BIG ONE: A SPECIAL REPORT

SEPARATING YOUR TRASH FROM RECYCLING: MESSY

City pays workers $20 an hour to do dirty work PAGE A8

NEIGHBORHOOD SENSORS MAP CARBON DIOXIDEBerkeley researchers measure

local greenhouse emissions, fi ght climate change PAGE A8

RESIDENTIAL HOTELSCAN’T JUST LET POLICE IN

Deadly 2010 confrontation leads to new rules affi rming

right to privacy PAGE B7

PARKING LOT TO BECOME POCKET PARK, BUT NOTQUIETLY IN THE MISSION

Neighborhood activists rejoice, as merchants say car

hatred goes too far PAGE A4

D.A. TO EXAMINE RECORD ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Gascón troubled by low prosecution rate compared with other

Bay Area counties PAGE B6

CALIFORNIA’SSOLITARY CELLSUNIMAGINABLE

Freed from Iran, seeing

parallels PAGE B6

GAINING CLOUT, MORE ASIANS RUN FOR OFFICE

New voters boosted Democrats PAGE A4

CITY COLLEGEWEIGHS COST OF FREE CLASSES

‘Lifelong learning’ could wither PAGE A3

HOW PG&E USES DEFERRED MAINTENANCE TO PICK YOUR POCKETS, WITH STATE HELPDavid Cay Johnston: Utility asks for rate hike to replace

power poles — on a leisurely 346-year cycle PAGE B8

PUBLIC MEDIA PARTNERS IN THIS ISSUEREAD MORE ON PAGE A2

A2 || sfpublicpress.org || ABOUT US | CIVICS | STREET | GREEN | EARTHQUAKE | JUSTICE | ECONOMY || San Francisco Public Press, Winter 2012-2013

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SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2012-2013 | A3

I t’s a busy Wednesday morning at the Mission Creek senior center, as arts and crafts students huddled around tables covered with artifi cial feathers,

paints, stencils and glue are assembling Halloween masks.

Vera Whelan, a diminutive 87-year-old, is hard at work on a white mask with pink and blue feathers on the pointed corners, and painted fl oral silhouettes. She used to teach arts and crafts to elementary students.

“I enjoyed watching them and teaching them — now I’m doing it myself,” Whelan

says. “I think it would be nice to pay for these kinds of classes as long as some of the other seniors can afford it. We all have to do our part to keep them going.”

For Whelan and hun-dreds of other seniors, this City College of San Francisco class, as well

as courses in music, health and literature, could be beyond the reach of many “life-long learning” students under changes proposed by the school’s leadership.

The courses, which have been free for 30 years, could end up becoming fee-based as the college struggles to keep its accreditation by resolving looming budget defi cits.

While an offi cial plan is being drafted for noncredit classes, the standard enroll-ment fee is $46 per semester unit.

City College’s general fund budget for 2012–2013 is $185 million, the school’s budget offi ce reported. Last year it was $190 million.

Four years ago, the state Legislature re-quired colleges to focus on three aspects of community college education: basic skills, transfers and careers, and techni-cal education. While the state set these priorities, it was also cutting community college funding.

Noncredit courses have suffered a steeper decrease than for-credit classes. The impli-cation is that lifelong learning is no longer a priority.

Because of these pressures, many California community colleges have either canceled lifelong learning courses or started charging for them. Unlike most peers across the state, City College of San Francisco has maintained about 500 of its noncredit courses for the 2012–2013 year.

JOB TRAINING LATER IN LIFE

Lifelong learning was a key part of the state’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Educa-tion. Its intention was to give Californians the opportunity to upgrade their skills to qualify for jobs, learn new skills for per-sonal enrichment and return for a degree in a new fi eld of study.

But now there is not enough money to pay for the classes, which include English as a second language, citizenship and older-adults courses.

There are 2,900 students now enrolled in noncredit courses at City College, including

lifelong learning, and more than 15 full-time professors.

A large number of lifelong learning stu-dents at City College are senior citizens.

Susan Hoffman, director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Berkeley, said older adults need to be engaged in the world of ideas, and interact with others.

She said a study by AARP found that se-niors who participate in learning programs make fewer doctor visits and use fewer prescription medications.

“From my point of view, lifelong learning is an underutilized public health strategy,” Hoffman said.

Natalie Berg, who recently won re-elec-tion to the City College Board of Trustees, said one of the problems with noncredit classes such as lifelong learning is that the school receives much less money for them than it does for credit courses.

“But we’re not going to cut them, with the population of San Francisco,” Berg said. “The ESL needs alone and the citizenship needs are much too high.”

Berg said a city as diverse as San Fran-cisco has diverse needs, complicating

decisions about what classes to cut. She said charging fees for large noncredit classes could bring in badly needed revenue.

Berg maintained that the board would not get rid of older-adult classes, but will consider charging for them.

OLDER ADULTS BENEFIT

The Older Adults Department offers free lifelong learning classes at City College, specially designed for those 55 and up, at more than 30 locations throughout the city.

Courses span several disciplines, in-cluding computers, health and wellness, language arts and the arts.

Diane Romaine, a City College professor who for the last 22 years has taught art for the Older Adults Department, said the elderly would not be able to afford to pay for courses.

“I think it would be really sad if they do start charging for lifelong learning,” she said. “I don’t know how the Older Adult pro-gram will deal with it or if we’d get more funding.”

Romaine said the program has therapeu-tic value in terms of helping the elderly

forget about their aches and pains.“It gives them a lot of self-esteem, since

they can’t accomplish much in their lives anymore,” she said. “So many things are closed to them.”

Whelan, who has been taking Romaine’s class for more than three years, said the seniors are torn about the possibility of having to pay.

Another student in the class, Gwendolyn Gee, 89, majored in music and graduated from City College 40 years ago.

“I was never very good at art, but lately I found a lot pleasure in it,” Gee said. “I don’t think they should charge for these classes, but I understand that young people have to come fi rst.”

RETHINKING COMMUNITY SERVICE CLASSES

The Legislature has recommended that schools that want to keep lifelong learning courses reclassify them as “community service” classes.

Like lifelong learning, these courses are noncredit, but they do cost money. While the college is prohibited from profi ting from them, it can charge for the costs of the instructor, room rental, heating and maintenance.

City College still receives state funding for lifelong learning and other free non-credit courses. But that will end if it decides to reclassify them as fee-based classes. The school’s current budget for noncredit courses is $590,000.

Many colleges have converted to com-munity service classes, said Rita Mize of director of State Policy and Research at the Community College League of California, a nonprofi t organization based in Sacra-mento.

Hoffman said the question of fees, and the ability of low-income students to pay, cannot be separated from the question of how the state or city provides necessary social supports for the community.

“The relentless attack on public edu-cation puts educational institutions in impossible situations: charge fees or drop programs,” she said. “It’s a terrible choice, and no college should have to make it.”

PROPOSITION 30 COULD HELP

The state has been struggling with budget defi cits for years, and has not been able to get approval for any tax increases through the Legislature.

Mize said that was the reason for placing Proposition 30 on the Nov. 6 state ballot. Its victory at the ballot box should restore $10.3 million to the City College budget.

But Prop 30 will not cover all the funds California community colleges have lost, which was $809 million. Lifelong learning and other noncredit classes will still be on the chopping block regardless of the elec-tion’s outcome, Mize said.

San Francisco’s Proposition A, which eas-ily won in November, will give the college $14 million annually for eight years from a new parcel tax.

City College Budget Woes ThreatenTo End Free Lifelong Learning ClassesEven with fresh infusion of money from voters, courses remain in crosshairs

“The relentless attack on public education puts educational institutions in impossible situations: charge fees or drop programs.”

F ederal food aid cutbacks have forced the San Francisco and Marin Food Banks to seek more cash donations from the community after it failed to

receive funds from the Emergency Food and Shelter Program for a second straight year.

Since 2010, the Food Bank has not received any funding from the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which would have gone to

purchasing more fresh produce. Its current food purchasing budget is $3.8 million, which represents a $161,000 reduction in aid from last year. Though the loss received a lot of publicity, the Food Bank — which serves San Fran-cisco and Marin counties — does not rely heavily

on federal funding, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

On average, less than 15 percent of the Food Bank’s funding comes from govern-ment sources. Most comes from individuals (nearly 60 percent), corporations (12 percent) and foundations (12 percent).

The Food Bank has worked for the past decade with food producers and providers to obtain a wide variety of fresh produce. It is working with farms in the Central Valley to get excess produce from growers and packers, said Blain Johnson, a Food Bank spokesman.

Through Farm to Family, a program run by the California Association of Food Banks, the San Francisco organization gets produce that is too small or too large for grocery store sale, and gets excess crop production for pennies a pound. Watermelons are about half the size of the store-bought variety, but no less tasty. This reduces food waste and provides hungry families with farm-fresh food.

The farm-direct supply is important be-cause more than half of what the Food Bank distributes is fresh produce. It will distribute about 26 million pounds of fruits and veg-etables to nonprofi t partners this year, out of a total of 45 million pounds of food.

The organization is working to make up the $161,000 loss of potential federal funds with donations from individuals and corpo-rations. The ability of the Food Bank to ob-tain food from a variety of low-cost sources means every dollar donated translates into $6 worth of food, Johnson said.

“The Food Bank had just signed with three other growers out in the Central Valley,” said Paul Ash, the group’s executive director. “We think we can get oranges year-round. Before we used to get those seven months out of the year.”

Ash is also working on fresh milk. Al-though the Food Bank receives a substantial amount of dairy, the milk market is heavily regulated, making it diffi cult for farmers to offl oad any surplus even if they wanted to. “We’ve been working with food companies and regulators to try to make some exemp-tions when producers want to donate fresh milk and we were able to get a truck load donated this year,” Ash said.

Struggles with federal funding are not anticipated to have any impact on the up-coming holiday season, although there was a shortage of turkeys for Thanksgiving.

The bulk of holiday provisions come from private donations from food manufacturers and suppliers. “These are private companies who are kind enough to donate their food products to the Food Bank and they are un-related to the federal government,” Johnson said.

Karl Robillard, senior manager at St.

Anthony Foundation, which provides food and shelter to those in need, said 50 percent of the organization’s daily meals and 95 percent of its produce comes from the Food Bank. But it relies on private donors for its holiday meals.

“If St. Anthony’s experienced a dramatic reduction from the Food Bank, we would have to scramble to fi nd other ways to serve healthy and nutritious meals to 3,000 home-less and low-income San Franciscans,” Robil-lard said. “Of the seven items that comprise our daily lunch, more than three of the items come from the Food Bank.”

But St. Anthony’s has not seen a reduction in food or an increase in cost from the Food Bank.

St. Vincent de Paul’s Multi-Service Center, one of the largest homeless shelters in San Francisco, has utilized the Food Bank for many years and used FEMA for a short time, but was not dependent on it.

“The Food Bank is a great source, but St. Vincent already has funding for meals,” said Chris Cody, the organization’s executive director. “This is supplemented by dona-tions from private funding. Our survivors of domestic violence shelters, the largest in

the city, also have funding for food that is supplemented by private funding.”

Budgeting problems with the city and the federal government since 2008 have taught St. Vincent’s organizers not to rely on funds from agencies such as FEMA, but to diversify and widen their donation base.

“We receive very substantial food dona-tions during the holidays,” Cody said. “These include food drives at schools, Catholic parishes, private companies and individuals. The food includes turkeys for the holidays and a great deal of canned and nonperish-able foods that we distribute through our programs.”

Michael G. Pappas, executive director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council, said that after the recession hit and demand for food skyrocketed, the Food Bank asked the council to identify four congregations in heavily populated parts of the city to serve as emergency recession pantries.

The relief pantries provide three meals to 100 homeless people each night during the coldest months of the year. They were able to identify congregations, gather volunteers to staff pantries and help the Food Bank in its campaign to inform faith leaders and congregants.

For almost a quarter of a century the Interfaith Council has identifi ed congrega-tions as shelter sites and organized them to serve meals at the Interfaith Winter Shelter. Congregations that cannot afford to pur-chase food at grocery stores can get it at the food bank, and the council covers the cost. But some food comes directly from the mem-bers themselves. Each year at the annual Interfaith Thanksgiving Prayer Breakfast, organizers collect tons of canned goods in large collection barrels.

Story:LissetteAlvarez// Public Press

Photo:Audrey Whitmeyer-Weathers // Public Press

For second year, local philanthropy substitutes forEmergency Food and Shelter Program funds

Local Donors Make Up for CutsIn Federal Funds at S.F. Food Bank

“If St. Anthony’s experienced a dramatic reduction from the Food Bank, we would have to scramble.”

City College of San Francisco is not just for youngsters. Gwendolyn Gee takes arts and crafts with other seniors at the Mission Creek Adult Health Center.

San Francisco Food Bank volunteer Maurice Williams shifts onions to make room for more vegetables.

Story:LissetteAlvarez// Public Press

Photo:Audrey Whitmeyer-Weathers // Public Press

A4 || sfpublicpress.org || CIVICS | STREET | GREEN | EARTHQUAKE | JUSTICE | ECONOMY || San Francisco Public Press, Winter 2012–2013

L ack of parking is a leading gripe for San Franciscans, who live in a heavily commuted city with more than half as

many registered vehicles as resi-dents.

The Mission District is no ex-ception, and the opening of such large-capacity venues in the neigh-borhood as Preservation Hall West and the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

means that the tedious routine of circling the block looking for an open parking spot is here to stay.

The conver-sion of a parking lot at 17th and

Folsom streets into a park highlights the need to balance adequate park-ing in the Mission with the desire for meaningful community space.

The transformation of the 220-space parking lot will begin in the summer of 2013. The lot will be split: Half will be used for a 32,000-square-foot park, and the other half is slated for housing at a future date.

Parking is an important issue for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), but it must also consider the city’s transit-fi rst policy, adopted in 1973, which encourages walking, biking and public transportation over the use of personal vehicles.

“Like all neighborhoods in San Francisco, there is a fi nite amount

of parking [in the Mission], which makes managing demand for that fi nite supply all the more impor-tant,” said transit agency spokesman Paul Rose. “Parking occupancies in the area are some of the high-est in the city.” Rose acknowledged the parking concerns that many neighbors and businesses expressed

when plans for the park at 17th and Folsom were announced.

To help manage parking in the area, the city is considering adding new meters and expanding residen-tial parking permit areas, Rose said.

“The proposal for exactly where these tools are used on which blocks is being revisited this year,” Rose said. “The SFMTA is collecting ad-ditional data and will work with neighbors on the detailed block-level analysis for where different parking management tools are appropriate.”

The transit agency is currently collecting data on a parking manage-ment proposal for the area.

Converting a parking lot into a park is a step in the right direction and in line with the city’s transit-fi rst policy, according to Connie Chan, director of public affairs for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department.

“Our city family believes in public transit fi rst and to be environmen-tally aware for a greener environ-ment. We work with other agencies to encourage this,” Chan said.

Creating a new park in the Mis-sion will help alleviate the neighbor-hood’s need for additional recre-ational and green space, Chan said.

“This project is unique to the Mis-sion neighborhood. We understand the lack of green space in the Mis-sion neighborhood. We have more kids growing up in the Mission now, so the idea of turning the parking lot to a park, with a community gar-den, is driven by community needs. We are more than happy to accom-modate that.”

Plans to use 8 percent of the new park for a community garden were announced in July by John Den-nis, an architect for the project. The parks department manages 36 community gardens in the city, with waits of up to two years for an individual plot.

“We look at this park as a healthy, sustainable need for the commu-nity. We consider this part of the neighborhood,” said Oscar Grande, a community organizer for People Organizing to Defend Environmen-tal and Economic Rights.

Grande, who has been working

with the city and the community to make the park at 17th and Folsom a reality, believes it will fi ll a greater need in the community than a park-ing lot. “A majority of the people in the neighborhood have low incomes and tend to drive less. You have a lot of family that don’t drive cars. We feel that those families and residents should benefi t from a park,” he said.

But parking remains an important

issue for Phillip Lesser, vice presi-dent for governmental affairs for the Mission Merchants Association.

Lesser has conducted his own survey of off-street parking in the Mission, using San Francisco transit agency numbers and personal obser-vations. With the increased demand for parking generated by new venues in the neighborhood and the loss of parking spaces to developments like

the 17th and Folsom park, the Mis-sion is in the negative, Lesser said.

“By 2013, people looking for curbside parking in the Mission will be wistfully longing for the mere inconveniences of 2012,” he said.

Read more from Mission Local about the ways a diverse community is changing the face of the neighborhood atmissionlocal.org.

B arack Obama’s victory, the numbers show, is in large measure due to the support he received from, among

others, Hispanics, blacks and female voters.

Less credited, however, are Asian-Americans, who voted 72 percent in favor of the president. While their numbers remain small, at just 5.8 percent of the population, they are

one of the fastest-growing seg-ments of Ameri-can society, according to a recent Pew study, having surpassed Hispanics as the

largest group of new immigrants. They are also highly educated, with nearly 50 percent of those 25 and older holding at least a bachelor’s degree.

Such statistics help explain the steady rise in political leaders of Asian descent in states like Califor-nia, home to sizable Asian-American populations. And perhaps nowhere is that more clear than in the Chinese community, where rapidly growing civic engagement also coincides with the growing strength of the world’s No. 2 superpower.

Last month, the Chinese-language World Journal ran a full-page spread profi ling 35 Chinese-American can-didates running for either local or national offi ce in the state.

In San Francisco, where the Asian-

American population hovers around 36 percent, and where the fi rst-ever Chinese-American mayor was recent-ly elected, 10 Chinese-American can-didates vied for seats in just about every branch of city government, from the Board of Supervisors to the Board of Education and the commu-nity college Board of Trustees.

That unprecedented turnout, said

Harvey Dong, who teaches Asian-American and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, signals an awareness of the changing demographics in both the state and nation, which, in turn, is fueling a “rising confi dence” among Asians and, particularly, the Chinese.

But it also comes following a hotly contested presidential race in

which the candidates strove to outdo one another in lambasting China, which was portrayed by both as a major threat to America’s continued prosperity.

China bashing, said Dong, poses a particular challenge for Chinese-American political hopefuls. “As Asian-American candidates, whether they like it or not, they are looked

at a certain way,” he notes, pointing out long-held stereotypes of Asian-Americans as not entirely American. “Their loyalty would defi nitely be questioned and challenged as they go higher up.”

A 2010 ad put out by the lob-bying group Citizens Against Government Waste, which ran again this past election, depicts a lecture hall 20 years into the future. A speaker addresses a room of students, explaining in Mandarin how it came to be that America now works for China. The camera pans across a room full of chuckling Asian faces.

Dong said such ads, coupled with vitriolic campaign rhetoric, help only to reaffi rm the belief among non-Asians that Chinese and other Asians in the United States are “perpetual foreigners.”

And it’s that attitude, said retired business consultant George Koo, that continues to motivate Chinese-Amer-icans to enter the political arena.

Koo, a member of the Committee of 100, which works to improve the political stature of Asian-Americans and U.S. relations with China, agrees with Dong that political attacks on China could pose problems for Chinese-American politicians seek-ing higher offi ce, especially in the country’s heartland.

“It may not be as much of a prob-lem in California,” he said, where the Chinese community has deep roots and where voters are more ex-

posed to dealings with China. Nor in New York, which just elected its fi rst-ever Asian-American congressperson in Grace Meng. “But in the south,

and the Midwest … if opponents play the China card, it could work.”

But with election results point-ing to the growing clout of minor-ity voters, and with an emerging cohort of elected Chinese offi cials, Koo questions the effectiveness of such a strategy in the long run. “We are going forward toward a more pluralistic society,” he said. “The China bashing, the ethnic bashing … it won’t pay off.”

New America Media aggregates and elaborates on the ethnic press nationwide. Read more politics coverage atnewamericamedia.org.

Confi dence among leaders of Asian descent leads to fl ood of qualifi ed candidates

Chinese-American Political Star Rising, Along With Fears of China

Story:Peter Schurmann // New America Media

“We are going forward toward a more pluralistic society. The China bashing, the ethnic bashing … it won’t pay off.”

The Chinese-language press had lots to write about on Election Day. This voter guide profi led 35 candidates. World Journal

Crossword:Andrea Carla Michaels// Public PressTweets

PUBLIC PRESS CROSSWORD

ACROSS

1 Whiz

5 Musicians’ copyright grp.

10 God of war

14 Hebrides island

15 Alexander of the old “60 Minutes”

16 “Funny ___”

17 Season to be jolly

18 Alarmist who cried “(39-Across)!”

20 Committee leader, briefl y

22 Sheep’s clothing?

23 Hodges of the Dodgers

24 Fine, feathered friend of 18 Across

28 Starstruck sort, maybe

31 Fill to excess

32 “If looks could kill” type of stare

33 Do-fa connection

35 Birth of a notion?

39 See 18-Across

44 Actor Rogen of “Knocked Up”

45 “___ Shanter,” Burns poem

46 Big Apple sch.

47 “___ Tu” (1974 hit)

51 Dinghy or wherry

53 Fine, feathered friend of 18-Across

57 Hex or verb suffi x

58 Trotsky, Spinks or Redbone

59 See 56-Down

63 Fine, feathered friend of 18-Across

67 Party pooper

68 Rendezvous

69 Dazzling display

70 Spiritual exercise

71 Hit the brakes

72 “I thought ___ never leave!”

73 Adam and Eve’s starter home?

DOWN

1 Multivitamin mineral

2 Relative of “aaah”

3 Fit for duty

4 Speak evil of

5 Type of tray you see less and less of

6 Pronoun for 16-Across

7 “___ talk?” (Joan Rivers catchphrase)

8 Irks

9 Bribe money for a DJ

10 Questionnaire info

11 “Lord of the ___” trilogy

12 “Sesame Street” character

13 In a foxy way

19 Schemer’s creation

21 “The Fountainhead” character Howard

25 Old-fashioned wedding word

26 Big rig, for short

27 Trompe l’___ (optical illusion)

28 Wisecrackers

29 Tummy trouble

30 No, to Nikita

34 Marx and Mao suffi x

36 “That’s Amore” singer Martin, to friends

37 Irish New Age singer

38 Bust ___ (laugh uproariously)

40 Chiang Kai- ___

41 “M*A*S*H” ’s Klinger portrayer

42 Frenzied

43 Request from one getting a backrub

48 Count (on)

49 Shoelace hole

50 Exhibit poor posture

52 “Ta-ta!”

53 Rundgren and Bridges

54 “Round up the ___ suspects!”

55 Book’s right-hand page

56 With 56-Down, famous storyteller

60 Humor

61 Egg on

62 John and Yoko’s “beautiful boy”

64 Gardens of London

65 Mary, of cosmetics who awards pink Cadillacs to her top salespeople

66 Paycheck stub letters

Answers PAGE A8

S.F. balancing need for community space with traffi c demands

Parking or Park? Mission District Development Goes Green

Story:Talal Ansari// Mission Local

Photo:Alan Sanchez// Mission Local

Half of the parking lot at 17th and Folsom streets will become a 32,000-square-foot park. Construction begins in the summer of 2013. The decision was a major victory for community activists demanding more green space, but local merchants bemoan the lack of parking.

“A majority of the people in the neighborhood have low incomes and tend to drive less.”


What did you do for work before be-coming homeless? I was a personal care attendant and receiving disability (SSI), but I was able to work part time until I could no longer work.

What do you miss most about being housed? I miss my home. I miss having a roof over my head. Having a safe building and I don’t have to carry my stuff around. I’m more stable being in a home. The cold makes my hip hurt more.

What need(s) have you had most diffi culty meeting while you’ve been homeless? Everything is different when you’re homeless. It could be something as simple as a toilet. I need my home back and my humanity back.

Have you ever been arrested or tick-eted? If so, what role did your home-lessness play? They tried to charge

me twice for crimes I didn’t commit, for assault after I was assaulted. I was the only one taken in.

What would you do to end homeless-ness? I would defi nitely push for better laws protecting tenants from slumlords. They should stop discriminating based on credit checks. It’s not legal and it shouldn’t be. They use credit checks to deny people a place on live.

SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG STREET


T he dilapidated Alexandria Theater might actually begin renovations by early next year, saving at least the facade of the Richmond District land-mark. But the new building would not look much

like its predecessor on the inside, with entertainment giving way to needed housing and retail.

The owners want to revamp the theater by building apartments where there is now a parking lot. Their pro-posal could reach the approval stage by next January — if the owners get their act together before December, said

Mary Woods, a staffer at the San Fran-cisco Planning Department.

The housing portion has dragged on because it kept changing and had to weather a fi ve-year environmental review. But ever since the theater shut in 2004, Richmond District residents

have complained about blight — graffi ti and homeless people sleeping under the entrance.

City offi cials, neighbors and the owners have been de-bating these ideas for years with little to show for it, said Richmond District resident Linda Lyon. “It would be nice to see it in my lifetime — to see it done,” she said.

Supervisor Eric Mar said he wanted to remedy the blight while preserving the historic theater. It became an issue in the last election, as his well-funded oppo-nent, David Lee, excoriated Mar for letting the theater go empty for years.

“My hope is that the current ownership is really able to move forward through the planning process so that we can have a spot that is really benefi tting the neighbor-hood,” said Mar, who was re-elected on Nov. 6.

The owner, Alexandria Enterprises, wants to add retail storefronts on the fi rst fl oor, a restaurant on the second fl oor and possibly a single-screen, 200-seat theater. The company envisions building 37 housing units in the parking lot and possibly more retail space, with two fl oors of underground parking.

Jonathan Pearlman of Elevation Architects said many of the theater’s exterior features would be kept, includ-ing the signs and marquee. The fi rst fl oor and main staircase would remain mostly intact.

Ron Miguel, a former planning commissioner and member of the Planning Association for the Richmond, reassured neighbors at a recent community meeting that the run-down theater would be renovated and reopened. “It’s really coming close,” he said. “That dark building across the street and parking lot will come into fruition.”

Ronald Yu, a representative for the company, said he remains optimistic. He said the “biggest hurdle” was the environmental impact report last year. The owners put up a chain-link fence to prevent homeless people from sleeping at the main entrance. Yu said that a janitor comes in twice a week to paint over graffi ti.

The owners will not set a construction start date until the Planning Commission approves the project, Yu said. Renovations to the theater building would most likely happen before the housing construction.

Woods said residents could contact her with concerns about the project before a public hearing is set [email protected].

The Richmond District Blog has posted the latest the-ater plans and renderings online.

The Alexandria Theater on Geary Boulevard and 18th Avenue has descended into blight since its closure in 2004.

Shopping, housing proposed at cinema shuttered since 2004

Alexandria Theater, a Richmond District Hub, Could Get New Life

Story and photo: Jerold Chinn // Public Press

D ean Clark loved being a cabdriver in San Francisco. The tall, laconic ex-Marine would drive night shifts

after teaching full time as a special ed teacher, and even kept it up while running for city supervisor.

But today, he swears by SideCar. Still active in the United Taxi

Workers union and an advocate for cabdrivers, he has “switched over,” driving several hours a day for the rideshare service that has already shaken up transportation in this city and across the country.

Clark discovered the sharing economy after an on-the-job ac-cident in 2010. The collision in downtown San Francisco threw his cab 30 feet, broke several of his bones, and temporarily blinded him. The cab company had not installed airbags in his car, and he was uninsured. “The EMT driver thought I was done for,” remembers Clark.

Although Clark managed to fi n-ish his race for supervisor, he could no longer sit or stand long enough to go back to driving, teaching or his prior tech jobs. He had $100,000 in medical bills and an uncertain future. He now supports himself through a combination of car- and house-sharing, and sleeps and works when he wants.

Clark started driving for SideCar, a ridesharing service based on a mobile app. It allows drivers to make extra cash by giving regis-tered users of the service a ride on request. Clark jumped back into it with 12 hour shifts, overdoing it and hurting his back. “I was anxious and happy I could go back and do something,” Clark said. But it was worlds better than driving a cab.

“Driving a cab, I was robbed three times. I was shot at,” said Clark, who talked about transit while on the stump as a candidate. “The cab companies just treat you terrible. There were no airbags in my cab at the time of the accident. The seat belt was held together by a clothespin.”

In San Francisco and other cities, ridesharing companies like Sidecar and Lyft and the other, new mobile-enabled services like Uber have grown so much because they are offer better user experiences and meet unmet demand. San Francis-co, where these programs have fi rst fl ourished, is the “worst metro city in America to grab a cab,” accord-ing to a national dispatcher quoted in the San Francisco Examiner. A study by the San Francisco Munici-pal Transportation Agency found that calls for taxis only get picked

up 40 percent of the time. On the other hand, the Sidecar

model of ridesharing offers a rating system for individual drivers and can often tell you to the minute when your ride is arriving. Payment is accomplished on your phone with one click, and you decide how much to pay.

Technological change always affects government and policy, and transportation is no different. Most cities regulate commercial driving through taxi commissions, and the supply of cabs is limited to a point that purportedly serves both the public and the interests of the cab companies themselves. As of Aug. 27, the waiting list to get a cab medallion in San Francisco is 1,439 names long.

This August, the California Public Utilities Commission issued cease-and-desist orders against Side-Car and its ride-sharing competitor Lyft, saying that their drivers need charter carry permits, which would ensure they are licensed, screened and insured. The cab commission in Washington, D.C., has tried a couple of times to shut down Uber, a mobile-phone limo service. In Massachusetts, the State Supreme Court issued a cease-and-desist order against then Ubercab — and Gov. Deval Patrick overrode it. (The company removed the word “cab” from its name after the order.)

As Clark sees it, expanded ride-sharing is simply addressing a lack in the city’s transportation system. The transportation agency is under-going an independent review to see how the city’s transportation needs are being met, according to spokes-man Paul Rose.

“We are exploring our options in terms of policies addressing alternative ridesharing companies,” said Rose. “In the short term, we are focused on making taxi service better throughout the city.”

Rose said the agency had taken recent steps to improve service and increase the pool of taxis: increas-ing temporary full-time taxis by up to 200, utilizing temporary taxi licenses during special events, al-lowing the option to pay by credit card, and making data available for application development.

With the amount of money at stake and the feuding interests of the cab companies, the rideshare companies, the city MTA, riders, and drivers, a showdown is inevi-table. Clark says it’s needed, and that he is looking forward to telling his story.

“If you try to argue that taxis are less safe than Sidecar, then just look at me,” said Clark, moving to ease the back pain that lingers from his accident. “I’m the poster child.”

Ridesharing Is the Future For San Francisco, Says Ex-Cabbie

Story:Hannah Miller // Shareable

T he discussion of homelessness in San Francisco assumes many viewpoints: tales of woe that evoke pity, illustrations of social inequities, homilies on the moral obligations to the less fortunate and tirades on homeless people’s perceived faults.

Often that discussion is led by policymakers, service provid-ers, business people and media. But the voices often lost in the dialogue are those belonging to homeless people themselves.

The San Francisco Public Press interviewed people living in the city without housing as they gathered at the Mission Resource Center and the S.F. Night Ministry open cathedral Sunday service at United Nations Plaza. They shared their experiences about lacking a permanent place to live.

Homeless People of San Francisco Speak Out INTERVIEW

Story:T.J. Johnston// Public Press

Photos:Tearsa Joy Hammock// Public Press

What did you do for work before becoming homeless? I’ve never worked. I volunteered with the LGBT Center, SF Drug Users Union and SF AIDS Founda-tion, overseeing groups and giving lec-tures regarding needle use and resources in the community. (Also) speaking to people about the church, where to get a bag lunch.

What need(s) have you had most diffi culty meeting while you’ve been homeless? Finding a place that gives you meals, not just food. If you don’t have a place where you have a refrigera-tor, what’s the point? A place to lay your head when you don’t have a bed.

Have you ever been arrested or tick-eted? If so, what role did your home-lessness play? I’ve gotten fi ve tickets within the last six months, all of them on Muni. The tickets are $103.

What would you do to end homeless-ness? I would get a big spot and build a location for 5,000 people and put toilets in it. It’s basically the only way to get people housed. The SROs really don’t work. They’re too expensive and infested with bedbugs and mice. It’s not a good situation.

What does home mean to you? Some place where I don’t have to worry about my safety or my belongings. A sense of security.

MARQUIS AUSBY, 23 (FIVE MONTHS HOMELESS)

What do you miss most about being housed? Having my own place and walk-ing where I want and hanging out with my friends.

What need(s) have you had most diffi culty meeting while you’ve been homeless? Getting my birth certifi cate, I’m still working on that. And fi nding housing.

Have you ever been arrested or ticketed? If so, what role did your homelessness play?I have one ticket. They call it “solicita-tion,” but I was walking down the street, going out for a normal night when the next thing I know, I get ticketed. I’m not paying it.

What would you do to end homeless-ness? Ha, I would fi nd a way to fund it! I’d buy a hotel and fi ll it with homeless people. Or get one donated to me.

What does home mean to you?A place where I could go in, put my feet up and relax and not worry about people taking your things away from you.

CHARLES WISHER, 54 (4 MONTHS HOMELESS)

What did you do for work before be-coming homeless? Seven years ago, I used to work as a janitor. The place was a bar (on California and Hyde streets) and the owner didn’t have a license to serve. I’ve also been doing some gardening and construction.

What do you miss most about being housed? Cooking, making my own bed. Having a bathroom. The rainy days are coming and we need shelter then.

What need(s) have you had most diffi culty meeting while you’ve been homeless? Washing clothes. It gets very depressing because it’s diffi cult to fi nd a job.

Have you ever been arrested or ticketed? If so, what role did your homelessness play? I got a ticket for

having an open container. I also got one for riding Muni without paying the fare. But I don’t think being homeless affected it. I got the ticket because I broke the law.

What would you do to end homeless-ness? I’d help the Shelter Monitoring Committee because I want to help people.

LEONARDO VIRGEN ROJAS, 51 (20 YEARS HOMELESS)

TAMARA COLE, 46 (THREE MONTHS HOMELESS)

What did you do for work before be-coming homeless? I was a workaholic activist with the anti-apartheid and the anti-nuclear movements. I have been working extensively in nonprofi ts. I didn’t anticipate getting sick with an autoimmune disease that’s in the same family as HIV. I have a catastrophic illness.

What need(s) have you had most diffi culty meeting while you’ve been homeless? I have no needs being met. Starvation is a key issue. I’ve lost a lot of weight. I think people don’t understand that when people are ill, you’re so far below on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it’s so hard you can’t move up from the fi rst level of needs.

Have you ever been arrested or ticketed? If so, what role did your homelessness play? I’ve been cited on the bus. Also, I was constantly told by police to move when it was raining with gale-force winds and I was huddled in a corner. The police said (then-Mayor Gavin) “Newsom doesn’t want the city to look like a Third World country.”

What would you do to end homeless-ness? I was asked that question for a job at a homeless services agency, and

I didn’t have an answer for that. It all points in the direction of the allot-ment of federal funding for affordable housing. During the fi rst few months of living in SROs, the government doesn’t consider it as housing. You don’t live in SROs — you die in them.

What does home mean to you? A stable environment where you may not have everything, but you feel safe and secure. And all the things you have are entitled by law, so you don’t have to worry about minimal things every second you exist.

LAUREN ALDEN, 60-ISH (SEVERAL YEARS HOMELESS)


I nitiatives to restrict the use of public spaces by homeless people in San Francisco remain controversial. San Francisco’s 2010 “sit-lie” ordinance made it illegal to sit or lie down on city sidewalks for most hours of the day. The law’s supporters argue that it moves homeless people off the

streets and into shelters, jobs or medical treatment. But some homeless people say it violates their right to dwell freely — essentially the right to be alive.

How does one build a place of one’s own in a city where other opportunities are not available? We all have the need to create a sense of home, even in extreme circum-stances. These photos reveal the architecture of homelessness, and contribute to the understanding of a displaced people who make their own functional living spaces with creativity and resourcefulness.

The images elaborate on the concept of a home. Streetlights look like house lights, and stairs are used for the intermediary space between sidewalk and door.

Likewise, their spaces redefi ne architectural elements: A freeway off-ramp functions as an overhang to guard against the rain. Concrete traffi c barriers act as walls that block the sound from passing cars. The defi nition of a wall changes to include cardboard, blankets, cinderblocks, even a Department of Public Works street sign. Some encampments have no walls at all, standing in sharp contrast to the houses that surround them, mirrored in each other’s windows.

Meanwhile, efforts to constrict the spaces homeless people occupy con-tinue. In November, voters in Berkeley narrowly rejected a measure similar to San Francisco’s. But whether strict or permissive, our policies about the spaces available to the homeless will continue to shape the blurred lines between public and private, urban and domestic.

Architecture of Homelessness

Photo Essay:Anna Vignet// Public Press

Clockwise from top: A homeless encampment in Bay Front Park in San Francisco; a man sleeps on the sidewalk on Minna Street between Seventh and Eighth streets in San Francisco; a man makes his home along the Fremont Street off-ramp of the Bay Bridge; Cece built her home under a freeway on Brannan Street in San Francisco — heavy

cardboard and tarps are her preferred building materials; a man sleeps in an alleyway behind a parking lot in Berkeley.


SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG GREEN


T o the list of things that started in the Bay Area — blue jeans, sourdough French bread, fortune cookies — you can

now add automobile fuel made from algae.

Last month, four service stations in Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley and Redwood City became the fi rst in the

world to pump the fuel, which is blended with conventional diesel in a 20 percent concen-tration.

Other companies are working on algae fuels as well. This is a bioreac-tor being developed by OriginOil scientists.

We were excited when we heard the news. It’s great to be fi rst, after all. But we also wondered why anyone would want fuel made from algae.

The fuel has a couple of advantag-es, said Robert Ames, a vice president at Solazyme, the South San Fran-cisco company that makes it.

When burned, the fuel gives off 30 percent less particulate matter, 20 percent less carbon monoxide and 10 percent less hydrocarbons than ultra-low sulfur conventional diesel, he said.

That sounds pretty good, but there are other types of biodiesel. Enter-prising chemists have concocted biodiesel from soybeans, canola and recycled cooking oil, among other sources, and some of these are already for sale in the Bay Area. We asked Ames how these compare with the algae fuel.

“From a sustainability standpoint, there are a lot of similarities,” he said. “How the algae-derived biodie-sel differs from biodiesels is that our technology platform can produce oils that are specifi cally tailored for specifi c applications.”

The company is already working with the U.S. Navy on jet fuel. Genen-tech and Volkswagen are trying out fuel blends from Solazyme as well, he said.

To get a broader perspective we spoke to Jeremy Martin, a biofuels expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.

Back in 2006, then President George W. Bush announced a new initiative to produce fuels from plants in hopes of making the United States less dependent on imported oil.

“The transition has been slower than people hoped,” Martin said.

A lot of attention focused on ethanol, and 40 percent of corn is now used for that purpose, he said. But growing corn itself consumes a lot of energy. Technology to convert cellulose — a compound found in most plants — into ethanol remains promising but has not yet become feasible.

Diesel made by algae offers pos-sibilities, said Martin. But the type used by Solazyme poses a potential problem: It eats sugar. Currently the sugar comes from sugarcane, and that means that automobiles powered by the fuel are indirectly competing with hungry human beings.

“I hope that Solazyme is able to make their process work with non-food sources of sugar,” said Martin. “That’s ultimately what’s going to really bring us the environmental benefi ts that people are expecting from biofuels.”

To really understand the environ-mental pros and cons of algae fuel would require a life-cycle analysis in which scientists look at the energy that goes into creating it, the effects on land, water and air, and emissions of all kinds, among other considerations, said Martin.

No one has conducted such an analysis of the Solazyme fuel, said Ames.

Still, the company is eager to fi nd out how well its fuel is working in Bay Area cars, so if you own one that can run on regular diesel, you’ll be welcome at the Propel stations.

Get daily news update from around the bay at blogs.kqed.org/newsfi x.

Diesel from algae competes with food sources

Story:Laird Harrison// KQEDNews Fix

“I love the paradox: Natural habitat with shorebirds amidst these factories and gravel pits. I see the plants getting healthier and birds coming in and thinking about nesting here.”

I n a polluted industrial area in southeast San Francisco, city agencies and natural-ists are carving out a series of oases along the San Francisco Bay meant to bring

back wildlife and visitors.With recent sightings of rare birds — along

with the reintroduction of a near-extinct plant — birders and biologists say the restora-

tion effort is fl ourishing. The restored marshy areas near Hunters Point now provide habitat for the California clapper rail and a recovered plant called

Suaeda californica.“I love the paradox: Natural habitat with

shorebirds amidst these factories and gravel pits,” said Kimberly Jannarone, a Golden Gate Audubon Society member and habitat restoration volunteer. “I see the plants getting healthier and birds coming in and thinking about nesting here.”

Jannarone was one of a smattering of bird-watchers out on a windy, sunny September day at Heron’s Head Park, a quiet stretch of nature providing eight acres of wetland habitat along the southeast waterfront of San Francisco. While this park provides the larg-est area of wetlands by the city’s bay, it is just a slice of a project under way to restore and connect a 13-mile corridor of waterways and trails from China Basin to Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, made possible by state and federal grants and the 2008 parks bond.

The Blue Greenway Project is a $66 mil-lion long-term undertaking by the Port of San Francisco, San Francisco Parks Alliance and other city agencies, planners, biologists and volunteers. This project has been under way for about eight years and still has several decades of labor ahead of it.

But workers are now putting the fi nish-ing touches on and around Heron’s Head, including a new meadow, fresh pathway, dog run and even a bidirectional track to protect bicyclists from traffi c as they cycle through the Blue Greenway area to the park.

Jannarone and fellow birder Richard Drechsler took turns gazing at an osprey nest through a telescope from the top of a park hill. They were trying to spot two rare birds other watchers had seen there just the day before: the lesser yellowlegs (a cousin of the more frequently seen greater yellowlegs) and a lark bunting.

While they had yet to see the lark bunting, Jannarone said the lesser yellowlegs had recently made an appearance.

But what has San Francisco bird enthusiasts really excited these days is a pair of California clapper rails, an endangered species that ar-rived and successfully nested in Heron’s Head Park about a year and a half ago. Drechsler said he was the one who fi rst spotted them here on July 3, 2010.

“They are shy, secretive birds,” he said. “Usu-ally, you fi nd them by surprise.”

Birders also keep an eye out for American avocets, killdeer, herons and many other birds in the park — so many that the Audubon Soci-

ety has released a publication called “A Field Guide to 100 Birds of Heron’s Head.”

To the north of Heron’s Head, Pier 94 has fi ve acres of wetlands that also provide an important habitat to birds and native plants within the Blue Greenway. This area used to be an unoffi cial dumping ground along the waterfront before volunteers began removing litter, debris and nonnative plants in 2002, said Noreen Weeden, volunteer coordinator for the Golden Gate Audubon Society.

The trick is to balance public access with protecting wildlife, said Carol Bach, an envi-ronmental affairs offi cer for the Port of San Francisco. Despite the fact that Heron’s Head Park and Pier 94 provide only small areas of habitat, she said, they are important ones to migratory birds that use these wetlands as their only stop in San Francisco.

“A lot of people in the neighborhood also have very little access to open space,” Bach said. “There are kids who live in the projects right above and have looked at the bay and the park but have never been to it, touched it or stuck their feet in the water. They don’t have appreciation for the natural environ-

ment because they haven’t experienced it.”That’s one reason the group Literacy for

Environmental Justice provides education and restoration work in the area with an Eco Center in Heron’s Head and environmental internships for youth from Bayview-Hunters Point.

This group has pulled out more than 30,000 pounds of trash at Candlestick Point since 2005 and planted more than 10,000 native plants, with the help of youth volunteers, be-tween Heron’s Head and Candlestick, accord-ing to Patrick Rump, acting executive director and nursery manager. Now, there are more than 130 bird species and 100 native plant species between those two areas.

The reintroduction of Suaeda californica, a rare green shrub also known as California seablite, represents one of the biggest native plant successes along the city’s southeast

waterfront.Coastal ecologist Patrick Baye said this

near-extinct plant was donated to the area around 1999 and produced many seeds before dying out. The seeds took root in Heron’s Head and, in 2004, were also transplanted to Pier 94, where they remain today.

“It’s been over 10 years, and they are hang-ing on,” said Baye, a former biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service focusing on endangered species recovery. “The point is, San Francisco is supporting an endangered species. It’s the only place it’s really hanging on besides Morro Bay.”

The whole area has experienced an infl ux of native plants and biodiversity within the last several years, said Rump, of the environmen-tal justice group. He’s also helped to restore native plants at Candlestick Point, a part of the Blue Greenway that was recently spared closure by the state park system.

“It’s not out of the woods, yet,” he said of the park and its fi nancial stability.

The closure would have meant reduced access at the southern end of the city, accord-ing to Meredith Thomas, director of policy and stewardship at the San Francisco Parks Alliance. This might have slowed the efforts of the Blue Greenway Project, meant to con-nect spaces along the waterfront — starting at Candlestick Point — to provide biking and hiking paths.

“We want to have a connected trail, so if you live near Candlestick you can bike through to work and then bike back and enjoy some birds,” she said. “We want to have a world-class destination of waterfront parks, and we’re zooming in on little parts at a time.”

The types of recreation that can be provided along the Blue Greenway are limited because of its location on public trust land, said David Beaupre, senior waterfront planner for the

Port of San Francisco. Activities allowed include “passive recreation,” such as picnic areas, and opportunities for fi shing, kayak-ing, hiking and cycling.

He said one goal of the project is to improve the area for boaters. Plans are already under way to create more kayak storage near Pier 52 within the next one to three years.

Islais Landing, another space for boaters that was a junkyard 15 years ago, is now a park used and maintained by Kayaks Unlim-ited. “It was an industrial area that was being abused,” Beaupre said. “We felt like if we could get a user group in here we could start some positive activities.”

The Port is also working with the San Francisco Arts Commission to beautify nearby former grain silos — now simply an eyesore — by adorning them with a big, bold piece of public art.

Some areas, such as Pier 70, are in the early stages of extensive planning to cater to all their competing interests. The 65-acre site is trying to maintain its shipyard operations while preserving historic buildings that date back to the 1880s.

But certain other places along the wa-terfront, such as Warm Water Cove Park, aren’t yet a priority of the project. The park, which attracts homeless camps, continues to struggle with limited support to care for its plants and keep the grounds clean.

“There’s been a lifetime of public misuse of the bay front,” said Rump. “So you can expect a lifetime of restoration work.”

Dhyana Levey is a contributor to Bay Nature and a San Francisco-based freelance reporter covering the environment.

Find more coverage of the Blue Greenways project at baynature.org.

The 8 acres of wetlands at Heron’s Head Park are becoming popular turf for San Francisco birders and other nature lovers

Trash Dump to Oasis in Southeast San Francisco

Story and Photos:Dhyana Levey// Bay Nature

Once a dumping ground in the Bayview, a small wetland park is a slice of what will become a 13-mile corridor of waterways and trails from China Basin to Candlestick Point.

You Can Now Fill Up On Algae Fuel in the Bay Area. But How Ecological Is It?

Birders, joggers, horticulturists and children share the wetland space that will expand greatly with the help of a $66 million Port of San Francisco initiative. The di-minutive park’s Eco Center pro-vides internships for neighborhood youth at Heron’s Head through Literacy for Environmental Justice.


S cientists have devised an intricate network of carbon dioxide sensors in the Bay Area that could offer objective

measurements to evaluate which cli-mate change initiatives are effective in reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The sensors provide real-time local data on how much carbon dioxide is being emit-ted, said lead

researcher Ronald Cohen, profes-sor of chemistry and of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

“What we hope the network will tell us is which of the many policies is working,” Cohen said. “It’ll tell us if cap-and-trade is the most effective thing we’re doing or electric cars is the most effective.”

Cap-and-trade, a component of Cal-ifornia’s Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, uses various tools to reduce greenhouse gas pol-lution. The program puts an overall limit on emissions produced by oil refi neries, utility companies and other emitters. Industries participat-ing in the program receive emission allowances — either the full amount for free, or a set percentage for free and the rest for purchase — that they can then sell on the market if they lower their emissions, creating an incentive for each business to reduce its carbon footprint.

The California Air Resources Board, the agency running the program, held the fi rst auction for allowances on Nov. 14.

Cohen said his team expects to dis-tinguish among different sources of carbon dioxide pollution, such as the amount from cars versus that from home heating systems.

The measurements obtained from the network could potentially be used to guide climate-friendly policies, including the promotion of high-density housing near public transportation.

In addition to carbon dioxide, the sensors monitor nitrogen dioxide, ozone and carbon monoxide levels. Data from the sensors are avail-able on the Berkeley Atmospheric CO2 Observation Network project website.

Cohen said the project is unique because of the large number of sen-sors to be installed across the region.

So far only 10 sensors have been mounted, he said, but his team plans to put up a total of 40 in a network extending from El Cerrito to San Leandro. Most will be in Oakland. The sensors cost about $4,000 each and have been installed on rooftops of schools in Oakland with the goal of educating children about atmo-

spheric science and measurements.Cohen plans to install one at the

Exploratorium in San Francisco when it moves to its new location at Pier 15.

The carbon dioxide sensor net-work is interesting to government offi cials because the gas has not yet been monitored locally. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which regulates air pollution, does not itself monitor carbon dioxide, but tracks emissions of the gas from industry reports, offi cials at the agency said.

“Carbon dioxide is not technically an air pollutant,” said Eric Steven-son, director of technical services at the air district. “It doesn’t have a direct health impact, so it’s not part of our monitoring network, but we do want to have a picture, because it’s important in terms of climate change.”

The sensors may also prove to be a

useful tool for environmental policy planners.

“Generally, we do not monitor air quality at this fi ne-grained of a scale,” said Laura Tam, sustainable development policy director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. “It will be interesting to look at data from this network, once it is built out over time, to see how much variation there is at the city or sub-regional scale.”

Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. Tam said the major effects of climate change in the Bay Area would be a rising sea level and an increase in extreme weather pat-terns.

“We’ll see increased hot weather in San Francisco,” she said. “In fact, parts of San Francisco and Alameda counties — because we haven’t really constructed buildings and housing

to deal with hot weather — are some of the most heat-vulnerable places in the entire United States.”

Greenhouse gas monitored on a neighborhood level for the fi rst time, illustrating local role in global warming

Bay Area Carbon Dioxide Sensor Network Built to Check Climate Change Policies

Story:Ambika Kandasamy// Public Press

I f you think of Recology as a set of blue, green and black bins that hang out in the alley of your house that you roll out to the curb weekly — you have no idea.

Over the last 10 years, what San Francis-cans have been thinking of “garbage collec-tion” has been transformed into something vastly different and much more industrial. What it actually does is closer to mining than just dumping trash.

Last month the 91-year-old worker-owned company announced that 80 percent of what San Franciscans put in the bins is going somewhere other than the landfi ll (http://sfpr.es/recycling1), a vast improvement on

the 34 percent national average.

All that requires a highly complicated sort-ing company, like a vast switching station for stuff. The 650 tons a day of recyclables hauled by Recology is divided up

almost entirely by hand, by a vast army of sorters into 20 different recycling programs that look at garbage as raw materials for something else. One redirects stuff to thrift stores, gypsum recycling, a wood-to-energy program, mattress recycling and of course residential and commercial compost, which makes its way from San Francisco curbs to the vineyards and produce farms of North-ern California.

The company has two programs for contractors tearing out and redoing houses (from small to big jobs). It has a couple of e-waste recycling programs for appliances and batteries. And there is an entire paint building, where the half-cans of paint people throw away are sorted by color, remixed and

given away. (Get your free paint here: http://sfpr.es/recycling2.) And most famously, the company has an onsite sculpture garden where artists in residence pull beauty out of garbage: (http://sfpr.es/recycling3). Even the plants are scavenged.

The 44-acre campus at Pier 96 has three vast corrugated-roof warehouses, the largest one is 200,000 square feet. They are giant, loud, industrial plants with bulldozers and trucks shoveling piles of stuff into giant heaps, massive metal and rubber conveyor belts running in different directions up several fl ights of steel stairs. There are stacks of giant bales: paper, cardboard, crushed clamshell trays, all watched over by the fi erc-est and fattest seagull population in the Bay Area.

Although the job is dangerous — many of the 2,100 workers have to wear hardhats, ear-plugs and safety gear — pay is $20 to $25 an hour plus participation in an employee own-ership program and solid benefi ts. It may be one of the most important environmental jobs in the city, but as long as the waste streams come into the facility comingled, they have to be separated mostly manually.

For all of this, Recology only makes 10 per-cent to 15 percent of its costs back from the sale of materials. Some of the most valuable is aluminum, which can actually be recycled into aircraft parts, and offi ce paper, whose pulp can be turned back into the inside of the cardboard boxes that surround almost every food item.

Recology does charge for the bulk compost it custom-mixes for farms, but in general, recycling still doesn’t make money. It’s not just that it costs a lot to remanufacture something — since products are just not made locally anymore, the cost of the fuel

to transport materials takes a toll. The remainder, 85 percent or so, ends up being the $25.77 Recology charges for household pickup service.

With San Francisco’s stated goal of “waste zero,” that means Recology is going to have to deal with the remaining, and most diffi -cult, 20 percent. The stuff that gets dumped by dozens of trucks into an enormous, stink-ing pit that is scraped into trucks destined

for the landfi ll (imagine a giant version of the trash-compactor room in “Star Wars”).

Part of it is technology. Plastic — increas-ingly more and more of the waste stream — is commercially recyclable only insofar as it can be separated by color and polymer. Recology CEO Mike San Giacomo said at the VERGE San Francisco green business confer-ence in November: “metals can be recycled over and over. I don’t know why we can’t do that with plastic.” The Recology plant has

new optical sorting machines that sense the color and weight of plastic bottles and shoot them with air jets into different areas, destined for new packaging, fi berfi ll for clothing or the landfi ll.

And part of it is policy. Recology is a mem-ber of the California Product Stewardship Council (http://sfpr.es/recycling4), an organi-zation pushing for a new idea in the way we think about industry and manufacturing: extended producer responsibility. In this way of looking at production, the company that manufactures a product is responsible for the materials in it, and therefore its recla-mation or reuse. It’s based on the idea that manufacturers have more ability to change the components in their products.

This approach acknowledges that many of the great leaps in working smarter with waste have come from political decision-makers. The city’s big hope is in the future of composting. Since residential compost-ing became mandatory in 2009, the rate of trash diversion has gone up, but 36 percent of compost is still going to landfi lls (http://sfpr.es/recycling5). Increasing the supply of compost takes education across the city. But Recology is also working hard to increase de-mand for it on the farm. Spokesman Robert Reed reports that some of the farmers taking the compost aren’t just using it as a soil amendment, but to plant cover crops that fi x greenhouse gases back into the soil. If this were implemented nationally with all our food waste, Reed said, the U.S. could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent.

Hundreds of Recology trucks have been slathered with new posters that simulate a glass window on the side of the trucks, show-ing a cutaway to old pizza boxes, strawberry caps and Chinese food takeaway containers.

“We want people to think about their re-fuse,” Reed said. “When you slow down and stop to look, it’s not garbage at all. These are all resources, and there is a relationship be-tween these resources and the environment.”

Not all recycling can be automated. Workers get $20 to $25 an hour to manually sort mountains of material speeding by on conveyor belts at Pier 96. It’s working: The city diverts 80 percent from the landfi ll.

San Francisco’s trash haulers obsessively sort and recyclewhat you dump — and set an example for the countryDirtytech:

Story:Hannah Miller// Public Press

Photos:Jason Winshell// Public Press

“The remaining 20 per-cent is the most diffi cult to recycle after it gets dumped in a stinking pit. Imagine a giant ver-sion of the trash-compac-tor room in ‘Star Wars.’”

Mixed plastic, metal and paper recycling enter the sorting area at the Recology processing center.

Solution to Crossword from page A4

San Francisco Public Press, Winter 2012–2013 || CIVICS | STREET | GREEN | EARTHQUAKE | JUSTICE | ECONOMY || sfpublicpress.org || B1

Delays in Earthquake Retrofitting

O ne in 14 San Franciscans lives in an old building with a fi rst fl oor that city inspectors say could be vulnerable to collapse if not retrofi tted soon to withstand a major earthquake.

While offi cials have had a preliminary list of nearly 3,000 suspect properties for more than three years, they have not told landlords, leaving the estimated 58,000 residents who live there ignorant that their buildings could be unstable.

A proposal circulating in City Hall would require owners of soft-story buildings — older wood-frame struc-tures with large windows or openings on the ground fl oor — to perform safety studies and retrofi t if necessary. City earthquake specialists are not sharing all the details about the pro-posal, which they say will go before the Board of Supervi-sors as soon as February.

But the Loma Prieta earthquake 23 years ago showed San Francisco just how dangerous soft-story buildings are. Now the city estimates it will take at least seven more years to carry out mandatory retrofi ts.

Some independent earthquake safety experts say even that deadline is too optimistic, warning that the project could take a decade or longer because of a shortage of trained engineers and welders, who are busy trying to keep pace with a recent construction boom.

Laurence Kornfi eld, a former chief building inspector who focuses on earthquake safety for the city administra-tor, said safety experts lately have made great progress helping to streamline complicated retrofi t standards. While he and his colleagues have felt a sense of urgency

to propose the mandate, he said, “it’s better to take the time to get everyone involved than to just push stuff past” the Board of Supervisors.

Two years ago, after voters narrowly rejected a ballot measure to help soft-story owners pay for the retrofi ts, the idea of an unfunded retrofi t mandate was put on the back burner.

But in recent conversations with banks, San Francisco has determined that landowners now have better access to private funding for the repairs than during the depths of the recession, said Patrick Otellini, the city’s newly ap-pointed retrofi t program director. Retrofi ts can run tens of thousands of dollars per building, and a recent city report pegged the citywide total at $260 million.

San Francisco offi cials said that the proposed mandate would require landlords to have the properties assessed, and would require reinforcement on the ground fl oor if necessary.

But in the years that offi cials have debated the par-ticulars of such a mandate, city offi cials have left tens of thousands of residents who live in these buildings unaware that, in a major earthquake, their homes might be at high risk of collapsing onto a structurally weak fi rst fl oor. Several other Bay Area cities have decided to err on the side of safety and disclose this information to owners and tenants.

William Strawn, spokesman for San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection, said it would be irre-sponsible to disseminate the preliminary list of soft-story buildings because it is incomplete and imprecise, and the city has not done follow-up studies to verify whether owners have performed retrofi ts without telling the city. Strawn said publicizing the list “might create anxiety and alarm” where it is not warranted.

Andy Chou, a 33-year-old freelance illustrator, moved into a soft-story building in the Mission District two years ago, in what he said was a step up from his single-room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin. His new home is in a three-story Victorian corner building with big-win-dowed shops below, facing the street — a classic soft-story.

Chou said that when he signed the lease, he under-stood that there was some safety risk. But he had no idea the city had identifi ed the building as potentially hazard-ous. Last year, though, after a series of moderate-intensi-ty quakes rattled the city, Chou and his neighbors made it a morbid running joke. “We’d talk about how this place would just go under,” he said.

A major quake, of course, can strike San Francisco at any time. There is roughly a 28 percent chance that an earthquake of at least magnitude-6.7 will hit the Bay Area within 10 years, said Edward Field, leader of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Working Group on California Earth-quake Probabilities.

Critics are on edge about the city’s lack of a soft-story policy. Debra Walker, a member of the Building Inspec-tion Commission who has worked for years on earth-quake safety studies, said she is worried that technical debates will lead to further delays in getting a manda-tory retrofi t proposal to the supervisors.

“We’ve been having the same conversation about seis-mic standards and funding for two years,” said Walker, who is also a board member of the San Francisco Plan-ning and Urban Research Association. “We have what we need. So then, let’s do it. Now. Next week.”

NO QUICK FIX

There’s a dark side to San Francisco’s rich architecture — the rows of Victorian era wood-frame buildings with their famous bay windows. Many of these apartment buildings were constructed in the early 1900s, before earthquake engineering became an established science.

Many of these buildings have big windows or glass-fronted retail shops on the ground fl oor. Others have had multi-car garages carved into them. These openings eliminate load-bearing walls and leave the ground fl oor “soft” and susceptible to collapse beneath the rest of the building.

All of the seven Marina District buildings that col-lapsed in 1989’s magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta quake were soft-story. “These buildings are really vulnerable, and some are exceptionally vulnerable,” said Tom Tobin,

Leave Thousands of S.F. Homes at Risk

sfpublicpress.org || B1

story continuedon page B2

Story:Noah Arroyo &Barbara Grady// Public Press

Illustration:Anna Vignet // Public Press

BRACINGBIG ONE

FOR THE

WHAT KINDS OF BUILDINGS ARE AT RISK AND WHY PAGE B2

CHECK OFF YOUR EARTHQUAKE SURVIVAL LIST PAGE B3

SEE IF YOUR BUILDING IS ON THE CITY’S LIST PAGE B4

NEGOTIATING WHO HAS TO RETROFIT AND WHEN PAGE B5

INSIDE

ONLINE: SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG/EARTHQUAKES

B2 || sfpublicpress.org || CIVICS | STREET | GREEN | EARTHQUAKE | JUSTICE | ECONOMY || San Francisco Public Press, Winter 2012–2013

president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Insti-tute, which is headquartered in Oakland. As opposed to other structural categories, soft-story buildings are “easy and cost-effective to make safer,” concluded a study by the Applied Technology Council, a Redwood City-based nonprofi t structural engineering research organization.

But until now, San Francisco has offered only a volun-tary program that gives building owners a modest break on permit fees. Only 53 building owners have completed retrofi ts under this initiative. At the average rate of 15 projects a year since 2009, the voluntary program would take 195 years to retrofi t all the problematic soft-story structures that the city has identifi ed so far. Because the city’s survey was so rough, it could be that there are more, or fewer, soft-story buildings in need of retrofi t work.

In October, the city hired what might be called an earthquake retrofi t czar. Patrick Otellini, 32, spent the last decade working as a consultant for some of the city’s largest landowners at A.R. Sanchez-Corea and Associates. His job was to save clients time and money by expedit-ing permits with the Department of Building Inspection and other city agencies. Major projects included the Four Seasons Hotel, the Main Branch Library, San Francisco International Airport, the Asian Art Museum and the Ferry Building.

His new job as a special assistant in the City Adminis-trator’s Offi ce pays $138,000 a year — a $42,000 step up from his old salary.

Now Otellini is in charge of writing the regulations. Kornfi eld said Otellini would succeed at pushing a man-datory retrofi t program through the Board of Supervisors because of his extensive experience and business connec-tions. “He knows the fi nanciers, the contractors, the city,” Kornfi eld said.

Otellini said a draft ordinance mandating that owners retrofi t soft-story buildings was circulating around the City Administrator’s Offi ce before he arrived this fall, and as of early December was being reviewed by the City Attorney’s Offi ce. “It’s largely complete,” he said.

But when asked for a copy of the draft law, Otellini declined to provide it. The reason: the document was exempt from public disclosure because of attorney-client privilege.

But Otellini did describe the proposed ordinance’s broad outlines. He said it would require soft-story build-ing owners to hire a certifi ed engineer or architect to perform an inspection and determine whether struc-tural strengthening is needed. If an inspection fi nds the building lacking, the owner would have to invest in a retrofi t. Retrofi t schedules would be tiered for the next seven years, he said, with the most vulnerable buildings having earlier deadlines.

While no city grants or loans are currently available, Otellini said his offi ce was still considering whether to identify sources of funding — though that might come after the legislation is publicly unveiled. One potential fi -nancial incentive under consideration, he said, is to raise the property tax rate on parcels with soft-story build-ings, and then provide that money back to the building owners in the form of grants or loans when they make retrofi ts.

David Chiu, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said he would make the proposal from the City Administrator’s Offi ce a high priority. “I believe we absolutely need to address the plight of thousands of soft-story buildings,” Chiu said.

Chiu appeared at a City Hall meeting on Dec. 3 with the retrofi t team to urge them to bring their proposal to the board without further delay. But even if it passes quickly, the last retrofi ts would not be done before 2020.

Some experts said even that goal was unrealistic.Independent structural engineer Patrick Buscovich

said the shortage of skilled labor could push back the retrofi t timeline to at least a decade. “There’s a lot of

these buildings,” he said. “You can only do so many build-ings per year. There’s only so many engineers, so many contractors.”

Michael Theriault, an ironworker who is secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, said the city’s seven-year timetable would happen only “if you were able to build constantly.”

Theriault, a former Building Inspection Commission member, puts the date of completion even further out. “It could take 20 years,” he said. “I think that’s easily possible.”

Over that time, said Field of the U.S. Geological Survey, the chance of an earthquake is about 48 percent. Soft-story retrofi ts require specialized, certifi ed steel weld-ers who Theriault said are currently in high demand as several hundred construction projects ramp up. Some are massive: the new 49er’s stadium in Santa Clara, Apple’s new campus in Cupertino and the ongoing Bay Bridge East Span project. “The union halls are virtually empty,” he said.

Kornfi eld said skilled labor would not dry up because the Bay Area “is one of the centers of structural engineer-ing in the country.” Most of the work, he added, can be

done by general contractors.S.F. HAS MIXED RECORD

San Francisco has scored some big successes in preparing vulnerable buildings for the next major shaking event.

In 1994, voters passed a $350 million bond measure to help fi nance the mandatory seismic retrofi tting of about 2,000 unreinforced masonry buildings. The measure went beyond requirements of a 1986 state law that merely required cities to inventory their stock of brick structures. To date, 95 percent of these buildings in San Francisco have been retrofi tted, Kornfi eld said. At the time, the city considered it essential to use the bond funds to provide low-interest loans to owners. But $280 million went unused because interest rates from banks were even lower.

For high-rise offi ce towers, building codes now require new construction to be able to withstand a major earth-quake, and to have elevator banks that are sturdy enough to allow use by fi refi ghters even if the building is on fi re.

Some building types are harder to fi x, or even iden-tify. Nonductile concrete structures — usually offi ces and light industry — are tricky to diagnose without an engineer poring over blueprints to determine whether the columns contain steel. A 2011 study estimated that San Francisco had roughly 3,000 of these buildings, and building offi cials have no prescription for them yet.

Soft-story buildings are far easier to address. Accord-ing to Kornfi eld, the city’s current draft ordinance will require owners to retrofi t the fi rst, “soft” fl oor, but not the rest of the building. This might involve anchoring the wood frame to the foundation, or reinforcing the fi rst fl oor with a steel frame.

So why hasn’t San Francisco required landlords to fi x the problem? Part of the reason is that, unlike with un-reinforced masonry buildings, the state does not require cities to even catalogue their soft-story buildings. Section 19160 of the California Health and Safety Code only encourages local governments to identify their problem-atic soft-story buildings and adopt programs to “reduce unacceptable hazards” by 2020.

No “cookbook recipe” exists for retrofi tting these buildings, said Thor Matteson, a structural engineer who evaluates and designs soft-story retrofi ts in San Francisco. The amount and type of strengthening depends on soil type underneath the building, whether there is water or termite damage, or whether contractors had previously attempted partial reinforcements.

San Francisco has yet to do what more than half the cities in the Bay Area have done — establish some policy to prod owners of soft-story apartment buildings to retrofi t or warn tenants if they have not. Some Bay Area cities have not waited for strong guidance from the state. Several cities near the active Hayward Fault in the East Bay — Berkeley, Alameda, San Leandro and Fremont — require building owners to inform tenants whether they have retrofi tted their buildings. Alameda and Fremont have gone a step further, forcing owners of multi-unit residential buildings to do the retrofi ts or face fi nes.

Berkeley requires soft-story building owners with fi ve or more apartments to hire an engineer to do an earth-quake safety evaluation. Now the City Council is con-sidering an ordinance to mandate that owners retrofi t buildings that fail inspection.

John Paxton, a real estate consultant who served on a long-running San Francisco earthquake safety study com-mittee, called Berkeley’s approach “ahead of the curve”

story continuedfrom page B1

story continuedon page B5

While some Bay Area cities tell tenants of possibly weak fi rst fl oors, S.F. says inspections should come fi rst

Above: Julio Nieto, a retrofi t specialist, uses a pneumatic palm nailer to anchor a wood-frame house in Palo Alto to its founda-tion. Thomas Anderson // Anderson-Niswander Construction

Left: Laurence Kornfi eld of the City Administrator’s Offi ce pre-sented a four-phase plan to retrofi t the city’s soft-story buildings at a City Hall meeting in early December. Noah Arroyo // Public Press

San Francisco’s Most Urgently Needed Retrofits

NEARLY COMPLETED: Unreinforced masonry buildingsIn the 1990s, the city identified 1,987 brick buildings that originally lacked wood or steel frames, making them vulnerable to shaking, and mandated they be retrofitted. Ironically, brick was the material of choice following the 1906 earthquake because they were so fire resistant. But in a strong quake, bricks can break away and injure people below. And the building itself can crumble if unreinforced by steel beams or diagonal braces.

A 1992 ordinance mandating retrofits fixed all but 158 of these build-ings. Voters approved a $350 million bond to help building owners cover costs, but to date only about $70 million has been used because private loans offered lower interest rates. Department of Building Inspection spokesman William Strawn said the department is working with the City Attorney’s Office to retrofit the stragglers, which are city-owned and uninhabited.

Photo: National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration/NGDC

UNRESOLVED: Non-ductile concrete buildingsThese structures, built before 1980, cannot adequately flex during a quake, so they tend to break apart instead. While professionals estimate that San Francisco has up to 3,000 of these, no one knows for sure. That is because they are impossible to visually identify, and require an engineer’s on-site inspection. They need to determine whether the con-crete supports have enough steel inside, but it’s often tricky to ascertain through study of the blueprints.

David Bonowitz, a structural engineer who has helped document these buildings in the city, said they vary widely in appearance and use, “but they almost certainly include schools.” Retrofits, which could include installing steel support frames, could cost mil-lions of dollars per building. “We just don't know,” Bonowitz said. The city expects to finish the decade-plus process to retrofit residential non-ductile concrete buildings by the early 2030s. Seismologists have said there is a 63 percent chance a major quake will occur between now and 2038.

Photo: Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center

CURRENT PLANS: Soft-story buildingsSan Francisco has identified 2,929 buildings whose “soft” first stories appear to be — at least from a drive-by assessment from the outside — vulnerable to collapse during a quake. Built before 1973, these buildings are all over the city and usually have a store with large windows or a garage in the first floor. They house about 58,000 residents. The City Administrator’s Office is developing leg-islation for early 2013 to require building owners to retrofit them.

That might involve anchoring the building’s wood frame to the founda-tion, reinforcing the first floor with a supplemental steel frame, modifying the foundation, or even installing a lighter roof. The city estimates that it will cost $260 million to retrofit all of San Francisco’s soft-story buildings. Major stick-ing point: Who’s going to pay for it? Meanwhile, tenants haven’t been told their buildings might be dangerous.

Photo: National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering

Photo collage: Erin DwyerCityscape photo: Atil Iscen


How to Increase Your Survival Chances In the Next Big EarthquakeIt’s never too late to prepare for the next big earthquake. The California Emer-gency Management Agency advises that the first 72 hours after a disaster are critical. Electricity, gas and water may be unavailable and first responders will be busy focusing emergency services on the most serious crises.

Having an earthquake kit is key to toughing it out on your own. Your kit should be easily accessible and have enough supplies for you, your family and pets to survive for at least three days.

There is no one-size-fits-all kit. Advice on kits varies by emergency relief agency. The California Emergency Manage-ment Agency breaks down kits into: essentials, sanitation, safety and comfort, cooking and tools, and supplies. See the checklist on this page.

Once you have the essentials covered, add personal hygiene and sanitation items to the kit — large trash bags and cans, toilet paper and household liquid chlorine laundry bleach. The American Red Cross advises us-ing 16 drops of bleach per gallon to sterilize any water that’s not bottled.

If you can’t stay in your home, make sure to know where shelters are in your area. The American Red Cross distributes an iPhone app called Shelter View, for finding out when and where shelters have been opened in your area during disasters.

Please consult the California Emergency Management Agency and Ameri-can Red Cross for further details.

Artwork by Anna Vignet Research by Jason Winshell

California Emergency Management Agencyhttp://www.calema.ca.gov/PlanningandPreparedness

American Red Crosswww.redcross.org/prepare/disaster/earthquake

San Francisco Dept. of Emergency Management72hours.org

THE ESSENTIALS

TOOLS & HELPFUL ITEMS

WATER RECLAMATION

PERSONAL

FAMILY

HOUSEHOLD

SHELTER

B4 || sfpublicpress.org || CIVICS | STREET | GREEN | EARTHQUAKE | JUSTICE | ECONOMY || San Francisco Public Press, Winter 2012–2013

Chestnut St — 1270 Clay St — 1301, 1441, 1452-1458, 1480-1482, 1534, 1538, 1556, 1611-1615, 1627, 1644, 1645, 1654, 1668-1670, 1680, 1714-1720, 1725, 1845-1847, 1865

Eddy St — 923 Filbert St — 1180, 1369

Francisco St — 1090, 1101, 1175

Franklin St — 909, 1920, 1930

Geary St — 947 Gough St — 1666, 1845, 1950, 2080, 2209

Green St — 1201, 1420, 1438, 1463-1473

Greenwich St — 1221, 1400, 1487

Hyde St — 963-969, 1010, 1020, 1127, 1135, 1142, 1150, 1215, 1221, 1250, 1326, 1438-1440, 1501-1521, 1550-1566, 1551, 1555, 1563, 1748, 1760, 1818, 1841, 1954-1964, 2054, 2140

Jackson St — 1225, 1276, 1278, 1312, 1323, 1345-1347, 1351-1353, 1398, 1405-1421, 1420, 1434, 1471, 1481-1485, 1524, 1534, 1542, 1552, 1567, 1574, 1580, 1627-1629, 1801, 1817, 1885, 2077

Jones St — 933-939, 946, 953-959, 1360, 1459, 1530, 1537, 1560, 1615, 1728

Larkin St — 1445, 1545-1549, 1600, 1625, 1631, 1637-1647, 1642, 1651, 1731, 1747-1755, 1748, 1754, 1831, 1864-1868, 2100, 2145, 2200, 2201, 2233, 2240, 2301, 2323, 2335, 2433, 2439

Leavenworth St — 936, 955-959, 1019, 1124, 1361, 1415, 1445, 1449, 1501, 1547-1553

North Point St — 870

Octavia St — 1808, 2411

Pacifi c Ave — 1215, 1218-1220, 1242, 1563-1565, 1630, 1720, 1740, 1750, 1760, 1770, 1828, 1831, 1845, 1856, 1920, 1964, 1966, 2007, 2010, 2016, 2060

Pine St — 1038-1042, 1044, 1060, 1155, 1163, 1167, 1173-1175, 1179-1181, 1225, 1243, 1324, 1355, 1385, 1490, 1515-1517, 1553-1565

Polk St — 1301-1327, 1437, 1618-1622, 1700-1718, 1729-1739, 1749, 1800-1808, 2023, 2048, 2055, 2208-2214, 2301, 2345, 2400, 2445, 2560, 2580, 2700, 2960, 3062-3064

Sacramento St — 1315-1325, 1329, 1345-1347, 1359, 1368, 1369, 1375, 1463, 1469, 1487, 1541, 1545, 1565,

94102Buchanan St — 235, 294, 500, 520

Fell St — 468, 480, 609-613, 647

Franklin St — 305, 325

Fulton St — 475, 495-497

Gough St — 330 Grove St — 315, 335, 486-490 1/2, 501, 582

Haight St — 39-57 173, 218, 220-224

Hayes St — 412-422, 435, 500, 524, 552-556, 560, 780

Hickory St — 574 Ivy St — 202-212, 292

Jones St — 240 Laguna St — 201, 253, 409, 700

Market St — 1874-1878

McAllister St — 685 Oak St — 230, 400, 452, 500

Octavia St — 355, 431, 508, 535-545, 636

Page St — 147, 210, 307, 400

Waller St — 68-78 201, 224-228, 235

941036th St — 136, 170, 482

7th St — 140 8th St — 160 9th St — 150, 205, 227, 251, 385, 449

10th St — 120-122 11th St — 230, 250-254

12th St — 288-296 14th St — 85, 257, 281, 420, 422, 440-444, 477, 485, 530, 550

15th St — 1531, 1533-1539, 1801, 1813-1817, 1818

16th St — 2791, 2874-2884, 2888, 2945-2947, 3032, 3178, 3222-3226, 3228-3232, 3250, 3251, 3255-3257, 3256

Boardman Pl — 55 Clementina St — 454, 481, 715, 716, 746

Clinton Park — 263, 277

Dolores St — 75, 107, 115, 159, 161, 173, 179, 189, 198, 199, 201, 219-221, 225-231, 254

Duboce Ave — 105-109, 131-135, 137, 170, 171-175

Elgin Park — 80, 88 Folsom St — 1040, 1137, 1582-1586, 1631, 1906-1908, 1910-1914, 1916-1918, 1930-1934

Guerrero St — 33, 125, 165, 186, 223-227, 250, 295-299, 334, 374, 389, 390-398

Hallam St — 10 Hampshire St — 101 Harrison St — 1849 Howard St — 1522, 1554, 1618-1624

Isis St — 14, 29-31Julian Ave — 173, 179

Kissling St — 107-119 Lafayette St — 48-58, 97

Minna St — 647, 651, 1341

Mission St — 1553-1557, 1845, 1906, 1914, 1930, 1939-1943

1589, 1656-1658, 1677, 1950, 1970, 1980

Sutter St — 1525, 1646, 1688

Union St — 1178-1188, 1395, 1445, 1455

Vallejo St — 1250, 1441-1451, 1456, 1462, 1465, 1473-1475, 1481-1485, 1555

Van Ness Ave — 1840, 2307, 2350, 2360, 2420, 2444-2446, 2500, 2501, 2517, 2526, 2725

Washington St — 1465, 1471, 1575, 1605-1617, 1633-1639, 1664, 1674, 1720-1726, 1732, 1740, 1753

9411017th St — 3223-3227, 3331-3333, 3542, 3554, 3562, 3564

18th St — 3351 19th St — 3338-3346

20th St — 3331-3333, 3433-3437, 3440, 3605, 3783

21st St — 3140, 3256, 3380, 3430, 3471

22nd St — 2712, 2715, 2936-2946, 2989-2993, 3050-3066, 3074-3078, 3075, 3129-3145, 3410, 3449, 3488

23rd St — 2837, 2882-2896, 3247, 3258, 3270, 3425, 3601-3611

24th St — 2435-2437, 2959-2967, 3059, 3172, 3186-3192, 3343, 3345-3347, 3362-3372, 3407, 3416, 3424, 3435, 3440, 3560, 3653, 3675

25th St — 3026, 3285, 3364-3374, 3421, 3465, 3515, 3721, 3730

26th St — 2950, 3150-3160, 3316-3326, 3420, 3475

27th St — 33, 101, 157

28th St — 2, 60 29th St — 122, 133 Alabama St — 1155-1161, 1165-1167

Albion St — 157-163, 165-171

Bartlett St — 307, 322, 363, 390, 410, 452, 520, 530

Bryant St — 2258, 2262, 2266, 2270, 2350, 2403, 2426, 2503, 2689

Capp St — 135, 200-218, 307, 396, 401-409, 513, 540, 557, 563 627-31, 633-37, 639, 656, 711 767-69, 840, 899, 905, 949, 959, 1084, 1106

Cesar Chavez St — 3159, 3351, 3763

Coleridge St — 1Cortland Ave — 1018

Day St — 22, 52 Dolores St — 366, 372-376, 755, 832, 878, 937, 1064, 1133, 1201, 1349, 1530, 1652

Duncan St — 132, 158

Fair Oaks St — 129, 220, 306, 479

Florida St — 900-910, 1411

Folsom St — 2106, 2108, 2393-2399, 2420, 2487-2489, 2561, 2629, 2700, 2847, 2952-2960, 2973

Gladys St — 2 Godeus — 17 Guerrero St — 801, 812, 842, 851, 943-953, 1000-1004, 1028, 1038, 1130, 1262-1268, 1272, 1295, 1410, 1414, 1426-1428, 1451, 1499

Hampshire St — 600-612, 983-995, 1001, 1011, 1202

Harrison St — 2789, 2872, 3037

Leese St — 31 Liberty St — 65, 171 Mission St — 2026-2030, 2032-2034, 2135-2137, 2171, 2217-2221, 2257, 2261-2263, 2265, 2327-2329, 2331-2333, 2351-2361, 2360, 2420, 2487, 2629, 2641, 2647, 2677, 2697, 2735, 2745, 2766, 2852, 2903, 2960, 3010, 3018, 3184, 3207, 3266, 3275, 3301, 3308, 3317, 3527, 3633, 3666, 3812

Potrero Ave — 601, 980, 1034

Precita Ave — 22, 642

S. Van Ness Ave — 514-520, 624-628, 654-658, 766-770, 880, 987-991, 1025, 1062-1066, 1065, 1073-1077, 1080-1090, 1102-1104, 1155-1167, 1186, 1271, 1311-1315, 1370, 1409, 1415, 1449, 1453, 1454

San Jose Ave — 215, 221, 251, 260, 267, 285, 289, 329-333, 330, 383-391, 692, 695, 730, 750, 865

Shotwell St — 604-610, 700, 778-782, 945

Tiffany Ave — 199 Treat Ave — 818-820, 864, 1103-1111

Utah St — 405 Valencia St — 504, 590, 901-907, 958-966, 975, 978, 991-999, 998, 1037-1041, 1152, 1159, 1206, 1234, 1355, 1362, 1390, 1406, 1424, 1451, 1470

Valley St — 36 Virginia Ave — 16 York St — 800-810, 952

94112Avalon Ave — 12 Broad St — 104, 119 Castle Manor Ave — 9, 10

Cayuga Ave — 993 College Ave — 190 Florentine St — 10

Italy Ave — 2 Maynard St — 2 Mission St — 3910, 3930, 3959, 3963, 3976, 3999, 4180, 4204, 4717, 4725, 4782, 4907, 4945, 5301, 5519, 5530, 5717, 5720, 5763, 5775, 5931

Naglee Ave — 2 Ocean Ave — 1344, 1401

Onondaga Ave — 288

Russia Ave — 515 San Jose Ave — 1780

Sickles Ave — 168, 132

Theresa St — 8

9411414th St — 702, 708, 726-730, 734, 750, 760, 819, 1056

15th St — 1970, 2035

16th St — 3310-3312, 3314-3320, 3322, 3336-3338, 3350, 3356-3358, 3362-3368, 3436, 3450-3452, 3459, 3475, 3491-3497, 3571

17th St — 3627-3633, 3836, 3946, 4135, 4521

18th St — 3801, 3824, 3875

19th St — 3830, 3856

20th St — 3821, 3939, 3945, 4323

21st St — 3560, 3600

22nd St — 3618, 3866

23rd St — 4475 24th St — 3730, 3986, 4001-4011, 4018, 4021

Alvarado St — 630, 690

Belcher St — 24, 34 Castro St — 2, 86, 161, 189, 700, 1400, 1450

Chattanooga St — 240

Church St — 235-241, 262-298, 269, 500-512, 520, 550, 718, 800, 1001-1003, 1005-1009, 1165, 1376

Clayton St — 1349, 1420

Clipper St — 135, 301

Corbett Ave — 311, 315, 445, 607, 627, 630, 646, 670, 675, 681

Cumberland St — 219, 237, 271

Douglass St — 501 Elizabeth St — 410, 442, 481

Eureka St — 53 Grand View Ave — 30, 315, 495, 695

Graystone Ter — 120, 130, 140, 150, 160, 170, 275, 300, 301, 310

Hancock St — 155 Henry St — 161 Hill St — 300 Landers St — 53, 60

Liberty St — 211,

240, 267-275, 390 Market St — 2075, 2095, 2160, 2162, 2256-2258, 2257, 2260, 2264-2268, 2304, 2324, 2337, 2341, 2605, 2645, 2710, 2727, 2775

Noe St — 188, 334, 362, 363, 849

Parkridge Dr — 20, 30, 98

Sanchez St — 57, 81-93, 101-111, 211, 227, 245, 264-266, 269-285

Sharon St — 36 Vicksburg St — 139-149

94115Anzavista Ave — 300-314

Baker St — 801, 844, 2208-2222

Barcelona Ave — 97 Broadway St — 2001, 2030, 2040, 2265, 2285, 2295, 2301

Broderick St — 900, 1250, 1730, 1903, 2025

Buchanan St — 2105, 2250, 2300, 2426

Bush St — 2345, 2357, 2472, 2476, 2696

California St — 2136, 2314, 2339, 2355, 2490, 2908, 3070, 3098, 3149, 3151

Clay St — 2514, 2539, 2585, 2595, 2735, 2829, 2835, 3014, 3101

Divisadero St — 1050, 1325, 1411, 1939, 1946, 1947

Eddy St — 1445 Ellis St — 2101 Fillmore St — 1912, 2121-2127, 2401, 2425, 2443-2445, 2530, 2632, 2635

Geary Blvd — 2416, 2434

Golden Gate Ave — 1440, 1450, 1460, 1470, 1495, 1645, 1700, 1750, 1761, 1819, 1827, 1885, 1888

Jackson St — 2275, 2325, 2351, 2363, 2380, 2401, 2429, 2455, 2705, 2772-2778, 2785, 2990, 3080

Laguna St — 2015, 2121

Lyon St — 2149, 2150-2152

McAllister St — 1284, 1400, 1560, 1604, 1670, 1755, 1780

Nido Ave — 90 O’Farrell St — 2025, 2171, 2185, 2231

Pacifi c Ave — 2171, 2199, 2230, 2240, 2300, 2301-2317, 2360, 2395, 2410, 3055

Pierce St — 956, 1925, 2107

Pine St — 2396, 2676, 2770, 2790, 2801

Post St — 1964, 2539, 2562, 2655

Moss St — 70 Natoma St — 526, 712-716, 1077-1087, 1084-1094

Pearl St — 19, 53 Ramona Ave — 30 Rosemont Pl — 30 Russ St — 15, 145, 155 S.

Shotwell St — 100-110, 107-111

Tehama St — 415-417

Valencia St — 204-208, 211-215, 224, 300, 418-422

Van Ness Ave — 303-305, 349, 359, 415-421, 436-440, 460, 450

Woodward St — 54, 55-59, 58, 58A, 58B, 60, 60A, 60B 65, 65A, 67, 67A, 69, 69A, 85, 85A, 85B, 87, 87A, 87B

941052nd St — 268

941075th St — 388 18th St — 1305 20th St — 2140, 2140

22nd St — 2274-2284

Connecticut St — 160, 250

De Haro St — 670 Folsom St — 977 Kansas St — 655, 741, 766

Mariposa St — 1335 Missouri St — 156 Pennsylvania Ave — 320, 324, 328

Rhode Island St — 625, 740

Shipley St — 239, 277

Tennessee St — 712 Texas St — 251 Vermont St — 604, 660

94108California St — 840 Clay St — 1037, 1123, 1140, 1144, 1150, 1171, 1199, 1235, 1275

Dashiell Hammet St — 39

Fella Pl — 5 Mason St — 1055, 1125

Pine St — 745, 935, 955, 961, 969, 977, 985, 995

Powell St — 634, 959, 1005, 1043, 1105

Sacramento St — 1242, 1246

Stockton St — 601, 621

Taylor St — 828, 840, 1146, 1219

Washington St — 959, 975, 1050, 1055, 1067, 1075, 1080, 1085, 1204

94109Bay St — 714-720, 785, 838-842, 900, 910, 940, 950, 960, 970

Broadway St — 1139, 1260, 1410, 1416, 1545, 1620, 1690, 1745, 1769, 1803, 1809, 1818, 1828, 1889

Bush St — 1448-1450, 1452

California St — 1260, 1320, 1337, 1430, 1436, 1450, 1462, 1507, 1512, 1544, 1633, 1817, 1960, 1966, 1987, 2011

Presidio Ave — 250, 560, 720, 910

Sacramento St — 2329, 2542, 2590, 2620, 2635, 2645, 2760, 2870, 3000

Saint Josephs Ave — 240

Scott St — 930, 936, 1025, 2155, 2217, 2301, 2321, 2355

Steiner St — 2230, 2240, 2264, 2268, 2302, 2334-2336

Sutter St — 2495, 2750, 2760

Terra Vista Ave — 22A-G, 70, 71, 80, 90, 148, 156

Turk St — 1701, 1725, 1801, 1825, 1840, 1850, 1900, 1901, 2121, 2161

Vega St — 1 Washington St — 2266, 2351, 2418, 2470, 2474, 2504, 2565, 2575, 2576-2580, 2812, 2845, 2848-2850, 2870-2878, 3124-3134, 3299

Webster St — 2313

9411617th Ave — 2400 23rd Ave — 2401, 2411

27th Ave — 2396 29th Ave — 2395 34th Ave — 2395 43rd Ave — 2390, 2598, 2601

44th Ave — 2600 Great Hwy — 2090, 2440, 2690

Quintara St — 950 Taraval St — 812, 1255, 2515, 2920, 3100, 3232, 3660

Vicente St — 3090, 3100, 3225

94117Alpine Ter — 35 Ashbury St — 17, 147-161, 251, 508, 545, 555, 557, 608, 609

Baker St — 101, 340, 400, 430

Belvedere St — 481 Broderick St — 141, 145, 515, 535, 545, 555, 720-730

Buena Vista Ave (East) — 65, 111, 123

Buena Vista Ave (West) — 543

Carl St — 2-14, 92, 94, 94B, 96, 98, 100, 102, 108, 115, 119, 121, 121A, 123, 128, 134, 135, 136, 198, 301, 344, 375, 415

Central Ave — 133, 135, 160, 461, 530

Clayton St — 125, 520, 539-545, 609, 635, 654, 801-803, 1175

Cole St — 28, 43, 130, 154, 455, 525, 532, 540, 580-588, 610, 615, 624, 627-629, 642, 675, 903-905, 917, 1012-1016, 1019, 1034-1038, 1040-1050

Divisadero St — 242, 244-246, 250-262, 270-272, 324-328, 330-334, 621-625, 655, 730, 744, 835-849

Duboce Ave — 400, 414-436, 800

Fell St — 701, 725, 949, 999, 1001, 1100, 1380, 1567-1570, 1578, 1770-1780, 1814-1818, 1852, 1970, 2070, 2100, 2130, 2136, 2140, 2150, 2160

Fillmore St — 105, 105A, 107-111, 136, 333, 339, 345, 349, 359, 500, 557, 657, 661-667, 709, 726, 733, 803, 837

Frederick St — 360 Fulton St — 1056, 1096, 1100, 1310, 1470, 1880, 1910, 1921, 1969, 1985, 2227, 2237

Germania St — 40-44, 46-50

Grattan St — 244 Grove St — 822, 870, 1221-1229, 1228, 1230, 1231, 1240, 1250, 1255, 1265, 1270, 1280, 1341-1345, 1349-1351, 1371, 1387-1393, 1401, 1431, 1678, 1706, 1946, 1985, 2000, 2001, 2090, 2144, 2190

Haight St — 400-402, 401, 417-421, 448, 493-499, 500-528, 555, 685, 707, 715, 720, 723, 739, 777, 801, 839, 849-859, 860, 863, 868-870, 876, 1042, 1190, 1296, 1300-1322, 1378, 1390, 1392, 1433, 1459, 1462, 1635, 1667

Hayes St — 800-802, 861-865, 906-916, 1155, 1167, 1220, 1245, 1273, 1290, 1359, 1398, 1670, 1686-1696, 1801, 1873-1891, 1935-1939, 2047-2051, 2077-2095, 2101, 2267-2275

Lyon St — 345, 415, 422-426, 500, 605, 644

Masonic Ave — 829-851, 1015, 1030, 1100, 1159

McAllister St — 1577-1593

Oak St — 600, 677, 850, 880, 900, 929, 1041-1059, 1053, 1101, 1499, 1519, 1541, 1555, 1565, 1659, 1661, 1697, 1699, 1815-1819, 1865, 1875, 1997-1999

Page St — 547, 561-565, 570, 585, 627, 635, 649, 655, 681, 751, 968, 990-998, 1003, 1038, 1300, 1325, 1333, 1337, 1363, 1373, 1375,

1456, 1591, 1683-1685, 1701-1705, 1746, 1801, 1859, 1881-1895, 1910

Park Hill Ave — 45 Parnassus Ave — 95, 101, 106, 144, 145, 156, 183

Pierce St — 120, 232, 261, 349-357, 400, 410, 415

Potomac St — 53 Scott St — 1, 65-67, 124-134, 208-216, 430, 556-560, 605, 635, 651

Shrader St — 40, 400-402, 520, 616, 629, 1409

Stanyan St — 650, 776, 850, 1044, 1050

Steiner St — 34-44, 115-119, 201-211, 206, 237, 399, 510, 548-556, 590, 612-616

Waller St — 301, 339, 371, 423, 511, 556-560, 604-612, 648, 727, 751, 840, 845, 855, 875, 1270-1274, 1432, 1585, 1645

Webster St — 50, 61-65, 563, 610, 643

Willard St — 1302

941182nd Ave — 126, 205, 435, 442, 716, 720

3rd Ave — 125, 146, 235, 276, 277, 334, 495

4th Ave — 159, 180, 203, 254, 269

5th Ave — 191, 201, 523, 550, 570

6th Ave — 110, 170, 360, 463, 554, 562, 786

7th Ave — 80, 81, 87, 180, 221, 225, 270, 420

8th Ave — 190, 205, 266, 276, 288, 348, 530, 565, 646

9th Ave — 136, 156, 195, 245, 246, 321, 325, 331, 333, 422, 430, 440, 444, 454, 695

10th Ave — 241, 280, 305, 337, 369

11th Ave — 161, 171, 180, 190, 201, 225, 246, 320, 330, 350, 384

12th Ave — 230, 238, 262, 268, 270, 274, 284, 356, 366

14th Ave — 195, 465, 495, 505

15th Ave — 410, 411, 430, 443, 447, 449

16th Ave — 131-133, 205, 220, 724

Anza St — 248, 740, 750, 960, 1010, 1304, 1600, 1726, 1940, 1944

Arguello Blvd — 112, 196-198, 200, 299, 300, 340, 345, 363, 367, 412, 418, 422, 430, 438, 440, 517, 521, 535, 545, 555, 561, 569, 583, 595,

707, 721, 725, 756, 765, 777, 860, 863

Balboa St — 735, 741, 745

Blake St — 65, 180 Cabrillo St — 1, 27, 300, 1045

California St — 3434, 3538, 3542-3544, 4131, 4432, 4450, 4540, 4950, 5000, 5010, 5011, 5021, 5431, 5441, 5450

Cherry St — 349 Clay St — 3595 Clement St — 18, 546, 817-823, 1059, 1345, 1550

Commonwealth Ave — 2

Cook St — 140 Cornwall St — 211 Euclid Ave — 236-248, 280, 435, 455, 835-837

Fulton St — 2454, 2470, 2550, 2950, 3010, 3024, 3100, 3124, 3910, 3918

Funston Ave — 10, 184, 190

Geary Blvd — 2828, 2886, 3126, 3210-3232, 3430-3440, 4630, 5029, 5044, 5125-5129, 5140

Golden Gate Ave — 2550

Heather Ave — 75, 85, 90

Jordan Ave — 1 Lake St — 100, 105, 130, 530, 550, 601, 620, 630, 650, 720, 830, 840, 1030, 1445

Laurel St — 600 Locust St — 345, 400

Lupine Ave — 4, 10, 70, 71, 99

Masonic Ave — 51 McAllister St — 2701

N. Willard St — 135, 222, 229

Palm Ave — 9, 24, 29, 80, 100, 119, 125, 140, 168, 172

Parker Ave — 78, 82, 86, 90, 100, 233, 275, 701

Sacramento St — 3562-3570, 3590, 3780-3790, 3810, 3870, 3892, 3943-3949, 3949A, 3967

Stanyan St — 50, 310

Turk Blvd — 2200, 2210, 2220, 2230, 2801, 3125

Turk St — 3155 Washington St — 3535

Wood St — 140, 154

9412118th Ave — 105 19th Ave — 133, 159, 295

20th Ave — 271, 279, 283, 301, 319, 359, 376, 404

21st Ave — 167, 175, 190, 229, 232, 266, 318, 355, 359, 375, 376

22nd Ave — 335, 371, 790

23rd Ave — 305, 410

24th Ave — 329, 351, 355, 365, 375, 434, 445, 510-512, 860, 895

25th Ave — 239, 267, 334, 395, 400, 418, 423, 475, 477, 801, 815, 875, 880, 885

26th Ave — 239, 270, 274, 325, 380, 400, 414, 505, 578, 590, 800, 820, 880

27th Ave — 405, 474, 475, 495, 553

28th Ave — 400, 401

29th Ave — 390, 494, 700, 895

30th Ave — 524 31st Ave — 395, 490, 700, 895

32nd Ave — 360, 890

33rd Ave — 571, 600-610, 626, 630, 636, 667, 690, 695

34th Ave — 423, 430, 477, 600, 690, 890

35th Ave — 69536th Ave — 695 38th Ave — 485, 495, 501, 695

39th Ave — 425 41st Ave — 600, 720, 776, 778

43rd Ave — 401, 464

44th Ave — 410, 422, 424, 430, 431

45th Ave — 601, 690

47th Ave — 731 48th Ave — 684, 695, 800

Anza St — 3501, 3525, 3735, 4300, 4340

Balboa St — 2715, 2742-2746, 3398, 3542, 3750, 4605, 4640, 4722, 4740

Cabrillo St — 1845, 1900, 2015, 2045, 2207, 2245, 2311, 2345, 2710, 2901

California St — 5700, 5940, 6310, 7001, 7015, 7025

Clement St — 1657, 2011, 2120, 3315

Fulton St — 4100, 4410, 4424, 4434, 4930, 5000, 5130, 5400, 5450, 6000, 6600

Geary Blvd — 5816, 5826, 5907, 5949, 6324, 6340, 6445, 6815, 6901, 7100, 7450, 7555, 7601, 8045, 8101

Lake St — 1711, 1735, 2450, 2455

Sutro Heights Ave — 150

94122 2nd Ave — 1252 7th Ave — 1224, 1240, 1367

8th Ave — 1201, 1214, 1241, 1251, 1255, 1261, 1275, 1391

9th Ave — 1360, 1365, 1369, 1384,

1770 10th Ave — 1245, 1251, 1255, 1257, 1261, 1332, 1352, 1359, 1365, 1371, 1379, 1395, 1400, 1401, 1421

11th Ave — 1212, 1215, 1259, 1267, 1273, 1335, 1370

12th Ave — 1201, 1290, 1649

14th Ave — 1211, 1301 15th Ave — 1200, 1280, 1295

16th Ave — 1323, 1329, 1335, 1339, 1345, 1346, 1385, 1395

17th Ave — 1200, 1266, 1275

18th Ave — 1200, 1225, 1249, 1266

19th Ave — 1226, 1231, 1250, 1700, 1710

20th Ave — 1229, 1241, 1245, 1250, 1326, 1345, 1401, 1458, 1800

24th Ave — 1401 26th Ave — 1400 28th Ave — 138530th Ave — 1399, 1401, 1410, 1414

31st Ave — 1300 41st Ave — 1300 45th Ave — 1295, 1301

47th Ave — 1295, 1355, 1371, 1395, 1400

48th Ave — 1535, 1538, 1573, 1612, 1627

Arguello Blvd — 1230

Funston Ave — 1270, 1274, 1392

Great Hwy — 1280, 1734

Hugo St — 139, 144, 236, 445

Irving St — 200, 225, 250, 544, 1300, 1330, 1550, 1720, 3937, 4326, 4336, 4725

Judah St — 230, 301, 1000, 1044, 1336, 1500, 2415, 2421, 2440, 2504, 2525, 2728, 4210, 4211, 4220, 4243, 4314, 4321, 4340

Kirkham St — 1175, 1539, 1545, 1640, 4350

La Playa St — 1220, 1230, 1250, 1262, 1301, 1306, 1400

Lawton St — 1300 Lincoln Way — 209, 1325, 1845, 4101, 4611

Locksley Ave — 102 Moraga St — 616 Noriega St — 1410, 1530, 1550, 1625, 1825, 1835, 1901, 3760

94123Alhambra St — 2, 15, 27, 90, 175, 179, 190, 200, 290

Avila St — 401 Bay St — 1143, 1165, 1215, 1225, 1235, 1307, 1355, 1435, 1640, 1660, 1690, 2100, 2101, 2185, 2190, 2240, 2250, 2285, 2300, 2301

Beach St — 1601, 1695, 1700, 1740, 1750, 1801, 1901, 1955-1963, 1990, 2000, 2101, 2190, 2195, 2200, 2245, 2249, 2265

Broderick St — 3030, 3079, 3121, 3130, 3155, 3301, 3450, 3465, 3555, 3636, 3650, 3726

Buchanan St — 3221, 3615, 3645

Capra Way — 10, 25, 40, 50, 75, 100, 101

Casa Way — 2 Cervantes Blvd — 25, 40, 44, 65, 95, 98, 101, 190, 239, 241

Chestnut St — 1311, 1365, 1401, 1437, 1447, 1450, 1457, 1490, 1521, 1525, 1555, 1565, 1583, 1626, 1631, 1655, 1665, 1670, 1685, 1721, 1725, 1731, 1737, 1841, 1895, 1901, 1925, 1949, 1957, 1995, 2050, 2120, 2272-2298, 2300, 2335-2337, 2341, 2360-2370, 2381, 2390, 2395, 2401, 2410, 2411, 2450, 2490, 2500, 2530, 2665

Divisadero St — 2960, 3146, 3250, 3459, 3501, 3560, 3701, 3810, 3820

Filbert St — 1538, 1541, 1575, 1600, 1630, 1642, 1648, 1651, 1690, 1695, 1730, 1771, 1814, 1833, 1843, 1918, 1990, 2170, 2294, 2296-2298, 2345, 2350, 2360-2370, 2598, 2800

Fillmore St — 3145-3147, 3201, 3334, 3344, 3345, 3423, 3455, 3501, 3535, 3565, 3575, 3620, 3637, 3711, 3727, 3731, 3737, 3755, 3759, 3775

Francisco St — 1200, 1229-1261, 1234, 1407, 1490, 1500, 1526, 1530, 1535, 2200, 2201, 2230, 2275, 2290, 2300, 2301, 2340, 2395, 2460

Franklin St — 2323, 2338, 2341, 2420, 2433, 2625, 2635, 2650, 2655, 2665, 2774, 2810, 2915, 2942, 3010, 3033, 3040, 3044, 3045, 3141, 3150

Gough St — 2550, 2552, 2614, 2630, 2636, 2642, 2648, 2654, 2660, 2810, 2811, 2901, 2929, 3006, 3055, 3101, 3201, 3210, 3235, 3260

Green St — 1530, 1535, 1538, 1560, 1565, 1599, 1667, 1675, 1835, 1845, 1915, 1999, 2145, 2195, 2280, 2298, 2301-2303, 2701, 2785

Greenwich St — 1539, 1540, 1545, 1671, 1681, 1690, 1759, 1801, 1884, 1907, 1911, 1915, 1956, 2000, 2015,

2167, 2206, 2303, 2305, 2311-2313, 2451, 2590, 2601, 2640, 2740, 2828

Jefferson St — 1801, 1840-1842, 1890, 1895, 1935, 1945, 1955, 1961, 1980, 2040

Laguna St — 2620, 3101, 3110, 3124, 3125, 3250, 3255, 3300, 3316, 3326, 3336, 3360, 3501

Lombard St — 1402, 1501, 1545, 1580, 1601, 1610, 1618, 1626, 1671, 1738, 1770, 1848, 1880, 1940, 1990, 2240, 2265, 2322, 2361, 2386-2390, 2443, 2447, 2439-2453, 2729

Lyon St — 2844 Mallorca Way — 154, 160, 180, 201, 225

North Point St — 1626, 1690, 1695, 1770, 2101, 2200, 2260

Octavia St — 2634, 2904, 2922, 3010, 3124, 3140, 3155, 3201, 3333, 3337, 3355, 3360

Pierce St — 2754, 2855, 3366, 3445, 3450, 3548, 3554, 3560

Pixley St — 277, 279, 281, 283, 285, 287

Prado St — 5 Retiro Way — 80, 141

Rico Way — 5 Scott St — 3055, 3060, 3126, 3155, 3233, 3425, 3490, 3636, 3665, 3800, 3824

Steiner St — 2859, 3025, 3315, 3261, 3163, 3165, 3325

Toledo Way — 1, 85, 96

Union St — 1568, 1576, 1658, 1685, 1766, 1767, 2226, 2485, 2585, 2806

Vallejo St — 1600, 1614, 1624-1626, 1640, 1730, 1761, 1808, 1820, 1851, 1854, 1859, 1868, 1874, 1883, 1901, 2000, 2010, 2080, 2140, 2160, 2199, 2372-2378

Van Ness Ave — 2925, 2935, 2945, 2955, 2975, 3015, 3025

Webster St — 2660, 2710, 2714, 2755, 2828, 3008, 3035, 3100, 3130, 3201, 3250

94127Monterey Blvd — 585, 670, 740

Portola Dr — 667-679

West Portal Ave — 41-45, 260

9413126th St — 3860, 4125

27th St — 201, 288 28th St — 101, 143, 150, 246, 250

30th St — 200, 211, 313

Arlington St — 455 Army St — 4135, 4150, 4155

Burnett Ave — 455, 465, 565, 571, 575, 579, 587,

San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection has kept a preliminary list of potentially dangerous ”soft-story” buildings since 2009, but inspectors say it has not been verified by actual building inspections, and was never intended for public consumption. Some of the ad-dresses the city generated might be wrong.

The Public Press is publishing the list (the best city record available) so that residents who might possibly be at risk in their homes can participate in the debate over how best to retrofit thousands of properties in coming years.

We are doing so against the advice of some experts, and the Department of Building Inspection itself. Wide distribution of the list, said department spokes-man William Strawn, ”might create anxiety and alarm” among residents in buildings that may actually turn out to be safe. But critics of the city’s approach, including Building Inspection Commission member Debra Walker, say the city needs more public pressure to move fast on a mandatory retrofit program.

In February 2007, San Francisco commissioned the Applied Technology Council, a nonprofit structural engineering organization, to inventory the buildings whose weak ground floors can collapse in an earth-quake. A team of engineers, architects, city staff and graduate students walked the city, noting wood-framed apartment complexes built before 1973, with more than three floors and more than five units. The buildings all had ”openings” on 80 percent of one wall, or 50 percent of two walls.

The list flags 2,929 addresses. The city estimates those buildings house 58,000 people.

David Bonowitz, a structural engineer who partici-pated in the study, said the list is rough, containing only buildings that ”resemble in the most superficial way the few buildings that collapsed in the Marina in 1989” during the Loma Prieta earthquake. Laurence Kornfield of the city’s Earthquake Safety Implementation Program said any of the buildings on the list might have already been reinforced, but that would have been impossible for the team to know.

Though San Francisco’s list has been available upon request since 2009, the city has never officially published it. A study summarizing the data but omitting the addresses, ”Here Today, Here Tomorrow: The Road to Earthquake Re-silience in San Francisco,” is viewable at sfcapss.org.

Cartography by Darin Jensen and Mike Jones, U.C. Berkeley CAGE Lab

Research and reporting by Noah Arroyo

A (Very Rough) List of Potentially Dangerous Residential Buildings

601, 609, 725, 755, 765, 775, 785, 795, 807, 811, 815, 821, 825, 850, 855, 875, 895, 935, 969

Castro St — 2031 Church St — 1606 Corbett Ave — 725, 801, 814, 824, 834, 860, 908

Crestline Dr — 1, 11, 41, 80, 88

Day St — 117, 119, 158

Dolores St — 1672 Duncan St — 201, 228, 315

Gardenside Dr — 10, 18, 22, 30, 38, 44, 50, 110, 120, 130, 140, 150, 155, 160

Laidley St — 154, 158

Market St — 3801Monterey Blvd — 174, 190

Noe St — 1351 Portola Dr — 110, 120, 146, 150, 160

Valley St — 164, 231, 336

Warren Dr — 405, 414, 415, 425, 430, 435, 444, 445, 455, 470, 475

94133Alta St — 40, 50 80-90

August Alley — 9 Bay St — 225, 649 Bret Harte Ter — 55 Broadway St — 402, 670-672, 835, 940

Chestnut St — 225, 321, 434-440, 780

Columbus Ave — 301-301 1/2, 342-354, 371-373, 500-524, 501-543, 575, 700, 1050, 1321, 1323

Filbert St — 540, 558, 741, 949, 1000, 1061

Francisco St — 241, 271-273, 424-434, 460

Genoa Pl — 55 Grant Ave — 1232, 1340, 1345-1353, 1363-1371, 1525-1529, 1750, 1821, 1831, 2017

Green St — 517-523, 686

Greenwich St — 333, 407, 409, 409A, 411-411A, 425, 439, 477-481, 483-495, 509, 519-523, 561, 637, 637A, 641-641A, 801, 808-814, 824-830, 840-848, 962-968, 1056-1062

Jackson St — 900, 1025, 1030, 1040, 1100, 1110, 1134, 1142

Jones St — 2412-2420

Kearny St — 1725 Leavenworth St — 1918-1928, 2100, 2545, 2555

Lombard St — 370, 444, 490, 566-570, 640, 670, 724-734, 786-788, 892-896

Mason St — 1325, 1753-1779, 1857-1859, 2153-2163, 2244-2250

Midway St — 23 Montgomery St — 1000-1010, 1306, 1360, 1441-1443, 1451

Pacifi c Ave — 930, 1046-1050

Powell St — 1351, 1443-1449, 2027-2033 1/2, 2055

Romolo Pl — 15 Stockton St — 1300, 1344, 1763-1767, 1848, 1869

Taylor St — 1410, 1426, 1948-1956, 2040-2048, 2121, 2332-2342

Telegraph Hill Blvd — 201, 241, 275

Union St — 218, 296, 550-556, 558, 560-562, 570, 601-619, 701-709, 755-763, 1011, 1020, 1074, 1082

Vallejo St — 637-639, 865

Vandewater St — 55

Wayne Pl — 30

Sources: building locations: ”Here Today — Here Tomorrow: The Road to Earthquake Resilience in San Francisco,” a study by the Applied Technology Council, 2009. Earthquake liquefaction susceptibility: U.S. Geological Survey, 2000.

Liquefaction Susceptibility

Medium

High

Very High

Listed Building


in the region.

RESIDENTS UNINFORMED

In 2007, a team of earthquake engineers from several city and state agencies launched a sidewalk survey of wood-frame properties in San Francisco with at least three fl oors and fi ve apartments built before 1973 — the year the city changed its building codes to prevent soft-story weakness.

The survey was completed in 2009. Of 4,573 buildings examined, the team located 2,929 properties that had potentially dangerous confi gurations on the fi rst fl oor, with windows, garages or other openings making up 80 percent of one outer wall, or 50 percent of two walls.

San Francisco has more soft-story buildings than any other Bay Area city, and they can be found in almost every neighborhood. The survey team found that 90 percent of these buildings are rental properties, where residents have little say in retrofi t decisions. Though the list is not exactly secret, it has not been posted on any city website. Strawn, from the Department of Building Inspection, said doing so “might create anxiety and alarm, when there really isn’t a basis for it.”

Kornfi eld added that the survey team created the list “for the purpose of diagnosing the scope of the problem. It does not, in any way, say, ‘here are the soft-story build-ings.’” The list isn’t defi nitive, because some buildings might contain interior load-bearing walls not visible to the staff surveying from the outside.

But offi cials in other jurisdictions concluded that the perfect is the enemy of the good and opted for public disclosure fi rst.

Armed with a similarly approximate list of soft-story buildings, Berkeley in 2005 passed an ordinance forcing owners of the listed buildings to notify their tenants in writing that they might be in danger. Owners also had to post a large-print notice in a conspicuous place within fi ve feet of the main entrance: “Earthquake Warning.

This is a soft story building with a soft, weak, or open front ground fl oor. You may not be safe inside or near such buildings during an earthquake.”

Before removing signs, owners have to prove their buildings are not dangerous. If they do not get an engi-neer’s evaluation within two years, the city can declare the property a public nuisance, and can even tear it down.

City offi cials say the public shaming puts market pres-sure on landlords.

“I can tell you, there are some tenants that will not rent an apartment in a soft-story building,” said Berkeley councilmember Laurie Capitelli. “They will go some-where else.”

Owners got the message. As of 2011, the owners of 77 percent of the 320 buildings on Berkeley’s list had at least begun the evaluation process. Twenty-eight percent of those either are now retrofi tting or already fi nished.

Of the total number of properties on the list, 58 percent were soft-story, in need of retrofi t. If the same proportion of San Francisco’s own estimate turned out to be unsafe, that would mean 39,000 tenants would be in harm’s way.

The city of Alameda passed its law in 2009 to establish an inventory of soft story buildings. It posted its list of suspected soft-story buildings on its website. Owners had to warn tenants that they might be in danger, with similar posted warning signs and written notices — until they could get an engineer to prove their building was not hazardous. Owners who failed to comply within 18 months could not legally rent out the building or even occupy it themselves.

But David Bonowitz, an engineer who represented the Structural Engineers Association of North America on San Francisco’s ongoing soft-story study, said San Fran-cisco’s challenge is the scale of its soft-story problem.

“Berkeley could do what it did only because the city

is small and the number of buildings is low,” he said, add-ing that the process there was messier than it needed to be. “They have a lot of false negatives and false positives.”

Because it the public has a right to access public in-formation, and also because other cities have disclosed similar lists apparently without causing harm, the San Francisco Public Press has published the full list of the San Francisco addresses at possible risk, along with a map showing their distribution throughout the city, here and online at sfpublicpress.org/softstorylist.

POLITICS, RECESSION SLOWED PROGRESS

San Francisco began a comprehensive earthquake safety study in 1998 during the administration of Mayor Willie Brown. The Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety did complete a proposal for soft-story retrofi ts — 12 years later. The report concluded that older wood-frame soft-story buildings “would be seriously damaged” in a major earthquake and “a signifi cant number could collapse.”

Otellini and Kornfi eld said their new legislation would be based largely on that plan.

The decade-plus delay was due partly to disbanding of the workgroup between 2003 and 2007, when the Build-ing Inspection Commission suspended its funding. At the time, the Department of Building Inspection’s annual budget surplus fell by 78 percent from when it launched the workgroup, to $3 million.

Among the committee’s biggest critics was Brown ally Joe O’Donoghue, then president of the Residential Build-ers Association of San Francisco. He said in public hear-ings that the Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety was unproductive because it would produce information the city already had.

The fi nal 2010 study, which cost more than $700,000 to complete, developed a broad set of policies to help the city prepare its privately owned buildings for the next major quake.

In 2008, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered the study team to fast-track research on soft-story buildings, said Paxton, “so that he could push forward some legislation and get moving on that.”

Had it passed, the fall 2010 ballot measure would have issued more than $46 million in bonds to provide grants and low-interest loans to landlords for soft-story retrofi ts. The idea at the time, Kornfi eld said, was to pass a soft-story retrofi t mandate swiftly on the heels of that victory. But the measure got 63 percent of the vote — painfully short of the 66.7 percent supermajority needed to pass a revenue bond measure.

Newly appointed earthquake czar Otellini served on a committee Newsom set up after the 2010 report — the Soft-Story Task Force. Otellini said the combination of the measure’s failure and the collapse of real estate value stopped the city from moving forward.

“When the task force concluded two years ago,” he said, “we were not in an economic climate to do this, since it was the worst recession we’ve had in 50 years.”

Danielle Hutchings Mieler, coordinator of the earth-quake and hazards program at the Association of Bay Area Governments, said cities have been loath to pass ordinances that could push recession-buffeted building owners into insolvency.

But now locally, at least, the recession appears to be lifting. By October 2012, a boom in the technology sector drove San Francisco’s unemployment rate down to 7.8 percent — a decline of 2.6 points from the height of the recession, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statis-tics. As tech workers moved in, apartment vacancies dropped. In July 2012, average rents had risen to $2,734, an increase of 12.9 percent, according to the real estate research fi rm Real Facts.

This time, the city envisions that the private sector will fi nance most of the soft-story retrofi ts. Retrofi tting a typical four-fl oor, fi ve-dwelling-unit soft-story apartment building in San Francisco would cost about $60,000, according to several estimates. With the property prices high, the loan-to-value ratio would be attractive to banks, for typical buildings valued in the $5 million to $7 mil-lion range, Otellini said.

But offi cials are well aware that some of the soft-story building stock is considered affordable housing and in low-income neighborhoods, he said. So the city expects to offer fi nancial assistance in some circumstances, he said.

With a soft-story retrofi t mandate slated to be rolled out in early 2013, San Francisco offi cials say the city will soon become a leader in the fi eld. Otellini said he believed San Francisco would be the fi rst major city to mandate soft-story retrofi ts on multi-unit buildings.

“The earthquake engineering world is very excited to see this thing succeed,” he said. “So, at the end of the day, it is very important to do this correctly.”

But Walker said she is tired of all the waiting: “Each day we don’t do this, knowing what we know, we’re put-ting so many people’s lives at risk.”

story continuedfrom page B2

Financing of retrofi ts becomes less of a roadblock as local real estate recovers

Andy Chou, a freelance illustrator, moved into his Mission District apartment two years ago unaware his building was on a list of potentially dangerous soft-story structures. Noah Arroyo // Public Press

A plan to require seismic retrofi ts on as many as 3,000 “soft-story” buildings in San Francisco can’t be executed all at once, experts say, because there aren’t enough engineers and

contractors who know how to do the work.So city offi cials are developing a system of triage:

Deal with the most dangerous buildings with the most people in them fi rst. Prop-erty owners, activists and public offi cials are now starting to weigh in on how the order gets set.

Under a plan circulating through City Hall, and expected to be before the Board of Supervisors as soon as February, retrofi ts would occur in four overlapping groups, with the most hazardous buildings fi nishing upgrades by 2017. Subsequent deadlines will be stag-gered out to 2020.

“We can’t do them all at once — we have to phase them,” said Laurence Kornfi eld, a longtime staffer in the Earthquake Safety Implementation Program in the City Administrator’s Offi ce.

A new committee, the Earthquake Safety Working Group, is tackling how to make seismic upgrades stick. It’s made up of volunteers from the legal, real estate and engineering communities, and it met at City Hall for the fi rst time on Dec. 3 to address soft-story retrofi ts and other earthquake issues.

The meeting foreshadowed the likely controversy about which property owners should get more time to seismically stabilize their buildings.

Laura Samant, an independent consultant on earthquake risk mitigation, said that even though restaurants and cafes have the highest safety risk, because the fi rst-fl oor businesses are occupied all day, they should be taken off the Phase 1 schedule.

“Livelihoods will be threatened by this program” when the businesses have to shut during the retrofi ts, she said.

But Chris Poland, chairman of the Degenkolb structural engineering fi rm, said retrofi t jobs are designed not to interrupt commercial operations.

John Paxton, an independent real estate consul-tant, said small building owners would be “more concerned about how are they going to get the money together” than owners of larger buildings. So the city should give them more time to save for the retrofi ts.

It costs $10,000 to $20,000 per dwelling unit to retrofi t a soft story, Kornfi eld said. That means a typical San Francisco soft-story building with four fl oors above a bay windowed-ground fl oor would cost about $60,000 to $80,000 to retrofi t. Department of Building Inspection records show that the voluntary program’s cheapest project was $8,000 and the most expensive was $5 million.

The plan would require owners of wood-frame structures built before 1978, and possessing at least three fl oors and fi ve apartments, to prove with an engineer’s inspection that they are not soft-story hazards. For those buildings needing a retrofi t, the city would require the retrofi t to meet engineering standards that are still under discussion.

The preliminary four-phase proposal is intended to address the most dangerous situations fi rst:

PHASE 1 — 2015 TO 2017

The riskiest buildings, such as those serving many occupants at one time, or used for educational purposes. These include day care centers, buildings in earthquake liquefaction zones and “assembly occupancy” buildings (large restaurants, cafes and non-retail businesses).

PHASE 2 — 2016 TO 2018

Buildings with 15 or more apartments. These repre-sent a potentially major loss of housing stock. They are at high risk of collapse, because of the bulk and weight riding on top of fi rst-fl oor openings, such as store windows and garages.

PHASE 3 — 2017 TO 2019

All other freestanding and corner soft-story build-ings.

PHASE 4 — 2018 TO 2020

Mid-block buildings. Even if their “soft” fi rst stories fail, these buildings are more likely to survive a ma-jor quake because their neighbors can hold them in place during the shaking.

No One Wants to Go First:S.F.’s Four-Phase Plan to Retrofit At-Risk Buildings

THE TIMELINE

Story:Noah Arroyo// Public Press

Bracing for the Big OneReporting Team

Since 2005, Berkeley has required owners of buildings on a soft-story list to do seismic inspections. Until they are retrofi tted, the buildings must display a standard warning sign. Noah Arroyo // Public Press

HOW YOU CAN SHAPE THE RETROFITTING ORDINANCE

Got an opinion or idea about how best to brace the city for the Big One? The Earthquake Safety Working Group meets at City Hall. The meetings are open to the public. Schedule for January and February:

• Monday, Jan. 7, 2013 (scheduled for room 370)• Monday, Feb. 4, 2013 (room TBA)• Subsequent meetings on an as-needed basis

For more information contact: Patrick Otellini, Director, Earthquake Safety Implementation Pro-gram. (415) 554-5404; [email protected]

San Francisco has more soft-story buildings than any other Bay Area city, and they can be found in almost every neighborhood.

Reporters: Noah Arroyo and Barbara GradyEditors: Michael Stoll, Richard Pestorich and Jason WinshellArtists: Anna Vignet and Erin DwyerCartographers: Darin Jensen and Mike JonesPhotographers: Anna Vignet, Atil Iscen and Noah Arroyo

Read more online: sfpublicpress.org/earthquakes

B6 || sfpublicpress.org || CIVICS | STREET | GREEN | EARTHQUAKE | JUSTICE | ECONOMY || San Francisco Public Press, Winter 2012-2013

S hane Bauer, who was hiking with two friends on the border between Iran and Iraq, was arrested by Iranian offi cials and jailed for 26 months. He writes, “No part of my experience

was worse than the four months I spent in solitary confi nement.” Now he’s back in northern California, and the investigative journalist has written an article about the conditions of solitary con-fi nement in America’s pris-ons, focusing on California.

Last July prisoners in the isolation wing at Pelican Bay Prison went on a hunger strike to protest conditions there. That strike, which began with a thousand prisoners, soon spread to six other prisons with as many as 12,000 inmates protesting against long-term secure housing unit confi nement across the state.

Bauer decided to fi nd out what solitary conditions were like in the United States and how people ended up there. His article was the cover story of Mother Jones magazine’s November/December issue.

KALW: For those of us who have never been in solitary confi nement, tell us what that’s like.Shane Bauer: The typical answer to anybody who you ask about solitary confi nement is that it’s something that is impossible to describe, but it’s kind of the antithesis of what we experience day to day, almost every

minute, having a world around us, people to interact with. When that’s taken away, everything changes, really.

You were released in September of 2011. How much of that experience do you think you carry with you?It’s defi nitely still a part of me, having gone through that. There’s a lot of research that’s been done on this — people who leave situations of isolation and have a hard time reintegrating.

So explain to us what the SHU is. That’s the secure housing unit in Pelican Bay, built in 1989 to house supposedly the most danger-ous inmates, and it’s very isolated — way up in the tip of northern California.So there are actually fi ve of these security-housing units across the state, and they essen-tially are units of isolation where inmates are put, usually in a cell alone, sometimes with a cellmate. In Pelican Bay, more than 95 percent of prisoners are in solitary. The vast majority, I think it’s around 97 percent, are there on in-defi nite terms, which means they don’t know when they will get out.

And the California Department of Correc-

tions and Rehabilitation says that they don’t consider the SHU solitary confi nement because inmates have TV. They have contact with staff when they bring them food.Right, and there’s no correctional department in the United States that will say that they have solitary confi nement. I was told the same thing in Iran.

A TV is not human contact. A guard sliding food through a slot is not human contact, and the U.N. actually defi nes solitary confi nement as 22 hours or more per day without human contact. So even two hours of human contact is still internationally considered solitary confi nement.

In the SHU, a guard will come to give them food, they have a television, they go out. Not actually outside — they go to what they call a dog run, which is a larger cell with an open top, for an hour.

And you spoke with Daniel Vasquez, who was the former warden of San Quentin, and he said that it’s very common for African-American prisoners who display leadership qualities or radical political views to end up in the SHU.The evidence that was used included Black Panther literature and a lot of people who are jailhouse lawyers. They’re usually people who taught themselves law in prison and will help other prisoners in their cases and even help them in fi ling grievances. A lot of these people

are put in because they associate with a gang member — they’re helping them on their case.

Caller “Polo” from El Cerrito: I guess [Shane Bauer] is comparing his incarceration to the current system that’s in place, the prisons that he visited. But in reality there’s no comparison. The guys who are in the SHU right now deserve to be there. They’re there because they commit-ted very serious crimes, not only by getting into prison, but while in prison. They’re not accused: they’re known gang members.

Bauer responds: The situation now is that people can get put in the SHU for committing a serious rules violation. If you beat somebody up, you get a fi nite sentence in the SHU. The longest of those is fi ve years. That’s if you kill a guard.

But association is a minimum of six years, and when people get put into the SHU it actually has nothing to do with their original crime. It doesn’t matter if they killed some-body or didn’t kill somebody. Nobody gets put into prison and goes right to the SHU.

It’s based on gang affi liation, and a little over 20 percent of people in the SHU are actu-ally gang members. The rest are not. They’re gang associates, and many of them haven’t even committed rules violations.

Listen this and other daily “Your Call” interviews on KALW’s website: kalw.org/programs/your-call.

S an Francisco District Attorney George Gascón said he is examining why his offi ce’s prosecutions for domestic vio-lence crimes were the lowest per capita

in the Bay Area.Gascón’s comments came after San Fran-

cisco Public Press execu-tive director Michael Stoll was interviewed in mid-September on the evening local news on KQED about

the fall cover story, “Domestic Violence: A City Responds.” The special report reveals that despite a “no-drop” policy for prosecu-tions even in cases in which victims refuse to cooperate, more than three-quarters of cases are dropped before going to court. That’s the second-lowest rate in the nine-county Bay Area, and the lowest by population.

Gascón, who did not make himself avail-able for comment during the two months in

which Public Press report-ers requested an interview, said at a news briefi ng that he was unsure why the department lagged behind the rest of the region in taking domestic violence investigations through to disposition in court.

“We are going to assess why that has occurred,” Gascón told KQED News. “But it appears to be a trend that has taken place during the last decade. And today I do not have an answer as to why.”

Asked to elaborate on what such an as-sessment would consist of, Assistant District Attorney Alex Bastian said he would research the question, but did not call back.

When asked earlier to explain the low prosecution rate, Bastian issued a prepared

statement from the offi ce: “Domestic violence cases are notoriously diffi cult to prosecute. Victims frequently recant, and depending on other evidence, the cases can be quite chal-lenging. We only charge a case when we have a good faith basis to believe that we can prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

San Francisco instituted a “no-drop” policy through a series of citywide reforms after a gruesome homicide in 2000 showed gaps in the criminal justice response to domestic violence. “No drop” means prosecutors should pursue cases for which there is strong evi-dence even when victims refuse to cooperate.

But in San Francisco, these cases go to court less often than in any other Bay Area county except for Contra Costa, a Public Press survey of the region found. Cases may be dropped for several reasons including lack of suffi cient evidence, though in several cases, police docu-ments show, prosecutors cited lack of coopera-

tion as a reason to decline a case.Domestic violence is the cause of half of

all the murders of women in California, and many perpetrators are repeat offenders. No-drop policies are designed to protect victims of domestic violence from retaliation, and also to disrupt patterns of escalating abuse.

San Francisco prosecutes 29.5 domestic violence cases per 10,000 residents. That puts it last in the Bay Area. Napa County tops the list at 179.1.

Cristine Soto DeBerry, Gascón’s chief of staff, has said that offi ce only has data on domestic violence prosecutions going back to July 2007. That means that if San Francisco’s low prosecution rate has roots somewhere in the previous decade, as Gascón has said, his offi ce may have trouble fi nding it.

More from the fall edition’s domestic violence report: sfpublicpress.org/domesticviolence

JUSTICE SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG

B6 | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2012-2013

George Gascón

San Francisco lags behind most of Bay Area, despite offi cial ‘no-drop’ policy for victims who recant

D.A. to Examine Low Prosecution of Domestic Violence Cases

Story:Noah Arroyo// Public Press

Host:Holly Kernan// “Your Call” on KALW Radio

Photo:Shane Bauer// Mother Jones

In California’s Version of Solitary Confinement, 5 Years for Killing Guard, 6 Years for Fomenting Trouble

INTERVIEW

Solitary cells are 11 feet 7 inches by 7 feet 7 inches. With about eight feet of walking space, pacing — essential to quiet the mind — is diffi cult. Despite cold cement fl oors, socks are forbidden.

W hile car break-ins are widespread in the Fillmore District, police statistics show these smash-and-grab

burglaries have decreased by 7 per-cent from last year in the Northern Police District, which comprises a large chunk of the neighborhood. This is because many victims don’t fi le a police report or notify insur-ance companies of the crime, the New Fillmore reports.

Victims said they remain silent about the burglaries, because they think the crime would not warrant an investigation, and they are afraid their auto insurers might hike up their premiums.

But these concerns constitute the misconceptions surrounding the crime of auto burglary.

“California state law says your rates can only go up if you cause an accident or have a moving violation,” said Jeff Johnson, an agent with the State Farm Insurance Company of-fi ce on Divisadero Street.

Police offi cers say victims and wit-nesses of car burglaries should call 911 if the crime just happened, and call 311 if several hours have elapsed since the crime occurred.

Read the full story by Chris Barnett in the New Fillmore.

Auto Burglary Victims Not Reporting Crime In Fillmore District

NEIGHBORHOOD NEWS

N oe Valley residents are seeing an increase in the theft of packages delivered to their doorsteps. Stolen items range

from a box of diapers to electronics, the Noe Valley Voice reports.

Jeff Fitch, U.S. postal inspector and spokesman for the San Francisco division of the Postal Inspection Service, told the newspaper that the agency has received numerous com-plaints from Noe Valley residents and is following up on them.

Although tracking mail thefts is diffi cult, because the San Francisco Police Department does not catego-rize the crime, local neighborhood listservs are fi lled with reports of stolen packages.

Robert Moser, police captain at the Mission Station, encouraged neigh-bors to report missing packages, even if the suspect is long gone.

“The sooner we know about a crime pattern, the sooner we can react,” he said. “The more informa-tion we get, the better we can deploy our offi cers and be at the right place at the right time.”

Read the full story by Heather World in the Noe Valley Voice.

Rise in Package Thefts In Noe Valley

M any streets in the Sunset Dis-trict now prohibit parking large vehicles such as motor homes overnight as a result

of a law passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors this fall. But homeless advocates say the legisla-tion discriminates against people who live in vehicles, according to the Sunset Beacon. The advocates questioned the city’s conviction in assisting people impacted by the law in fi nding housing.

“Some of them park for six to nine months,” said John Zwolinski, one of the founders of a neighborhood group that counted the number of large vehicles in the area.

The law would also impact busi-nesses with delivery vehicles, which would not be allowed to park over-night in the areas covered by the legislation.

Read the full story by Jonathan Farrell in the Sunset Beacon.

Overnight Parking Ban In Parts of the Sunset

Shane Bauer

San Francisco Public Press, Winter 2012-2013 || CIVICS | STREET | GREEN | EARTHQUAKE | JUSTICE | ECONOMY || sfpublicpress.org || B7

A fter a mentally ill man was shot and killed by a police offi cer inside his residential hotel room, the San Francisco Police Department has clarifi ed its policy on entering homes: All residents, including

those living in hotels, have the same privacy rights.Amid little fanfare, Police Chief Greg Suhr admon-

ished the offi cer and issued a train-ing memo to the department that outlines the law. The memo states that offi cers are allowed to enter a residence without permission only when there is an immediate safety threat, to prevent the destruction of evidence, when the offi cers are in hot pursuit of a suspect or if the resi-dence is a crime scene.

Offi cers also are allowed to enter with a resident’s consent, with a warrant, to provide emergency medical assistance or if the resident’s proba-tion or parole conditions permit searches. After the memo was distributed in July, offi cers were required to sign a statement that they had read and understood it.

“Members are reminded that individuals have an expectation of privacy in their residences,” Suhr wrote. “Tenants of hotels, including single room occupancy hotels, possess the same constitutional rights and protec-tions related to law enforcement entry into their hotel room.”

The memo was a quiet resolution to a tragic case. In 2010, a patrol offi cer shot and killed a mentally ill man inside his residential hotel room after the manager un-locked the man’s door.

The offi cer, Kimberly Koltzoff, had been responding to a noise complaint. When she arrived at the Granada Hotel, the manager led her to the room of Michael Lee, a mentally ill man with a history of hostility toward the police. Instead of knocking, the manager unlocked Lee’s door, and Koltzoff walked inside. Moments later, the of-fi cer shot Lee.

San Francisco’s Offi ce of Citizen Complaints, which investigates complaints against offi cers, determined earlier this year that Koltzoff had violated department policy by illegally entering Lee’s residence. According to the group’s report, Suhr determined that Koltzoff had

received inadequate training and did not discipline her for the shooting.

Although offi cers are trained in search and seizure law, Suhr ordered Koltzoff to receive new training and issued the memo to ensure all offi cers were familiar with the requirements pertaining to residential hotels.

“The point is, you need to be treating these single-room occupancy hotel residents the same way you treat anybody who lives in a single-family dwelling,” said Joyce Hicks, executive director of the Offi ce of Citizen Complaints, which helped draft the memo. “You have the same rights.”

San Francisco police offi cers have come under increas-ing criticism for using room keys to enter residential hotel rooms, a practice that led attorneys to accuse the department of abusing the city’s poorest residents. Last year, several hotel managers told the Bay Citizen that they regularly gave police offi cers the room keys because they believed it helped combat crime, which is common in some residential hotels.

The FBI is investigating several cases after public de-fender Jeff Adachi released a series of surveillance videos

last year that allegedly showed San Francisco police offi cers illegally entering and searching residential hotel rooms. The videos show them taking items that were never booked into evidence or mentioned in police re-ports. In some cases, the offi cers had used hotel passkeys to get into the rooms.

As a result of the videos, prosecutors dropped hun-dreds of cases, and many of the offi cers were placed on desk duty. The San Francisco Police Offi cers Association has reported that several offi cers have been called to testify as witnesses before a federal grand jury.

Adachi, who had been lobbying the Board of Supervi-sors to pass legislation barring police offi cers from using hotel room keys, said Suhr’s memo satisfi ed his concerns.

“We don’t want a situation where police can enter anyone’s residence without a reason,” he said. “And we certainly don’t want a different standard to apply just because they live in single-room occupancy hotels.”

But Adachi, who said he has not seen any recent cases, still expressed skepticism.

“It remains to be seen whether or not the practice will end,” he said.

Following deadly incident in 2010, when manager allowed offi cer into room without tenant permission, department changes policy

San Francisco Police Told to Follow Privacy Law in Residential Hotels

Story:Shoshana Walter// Bay Citizen

Photo:Audrey Whitmeyer-Weathers// Public Press

Thomas Riley Hester, a resident of the Granada Hotel, where in 2010 police entered another resident’s room — an incident ending in the resident being fatally shot. Hester, who has lived at the hotel off and on for about six years, said that he has become used to seeing bad things happen in his building. But Hester said he couldn’t see himself living anywhere else. “I live here because I love San Francisco. This is my home.”

F BI investigators used a court order authorizing access to cell phone customer data to quietly deploy a powerful

surveillance technology known as “stingrays,” privacy groups contend in a new court fi ling, which claims that the devices are overly inva-sive.

Your cell phone can be singled out by

its international mobile subscriber identity, or IMSI, which then makes it possible to secretly determine your whereabouts using stingray devices, also known as IMSI catchers. The law enforcement tool troubles security experts and civil libertarians alike because it mimics cell phone towers. Stingrays track the locations of mo-bile devices, including those that are not targeted but are nearby.

IMSI catchers can also be adjusted to capture the content of communi-cations, but the government claims that was not done in this case.

in 2010 an expert showed specta-tors at a technology conference in Las Vegas that IMSI catchers could be built at home for as little as $1,500, exposing a potential weakness in cell phone security.

Thirty cell phones in the room re-portedly attempted to connect to his do-it-yourself tower, and anyone in

the room who made a call while con-nected to it received an automated message that said their communica-tions were being recorded.

The government’s pursuit of an alleged tax fraudster that began in Northern California and is now playing out in an Arizona courtroom has become the fi rst major consti-tutional challenge to stingrays. Law enforcement agencies using the technology have held it close to the chest, and the public has little knowledge of it.

In an Oct. 19 friend-of-the-court brief fi led with the U.S. District Court of Arizona, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California argued that stingrays are “highly intrusive and indiscriminate,” and claimed government investigators sought to utilize them while providing Judge Richard Seeborg with scant details about the technology’s extraordi-nary power.

“The government prevented the court from making an informed determination on the warrant appli-cation,” said Linda Lye, staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California. “Maybe the court would have said, ‘No, I’m not going to grant this at all because of the impact on third parties.’ Maybe the court would have said, ‘OK, you can do this, but let’s follow these safeguards and proce-dures to make sure that third-party privacy is protected.”

The point of warrants is to ensure that searches are confi ned only to those who are the focus of an inves-tigation, added Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They’re also designed to make certain nothing is left to the discretion of individual offi cers, something framers of the Constitution had in mind after British soldiers prior to the Revolu-tionary War conducted door-to-door searches at will.

“If you read the warrant affi davit, it has absolutely zero mention at all of IMSI catchers and stingrays or fake cell phone towers or any expla-nation of the technology,” Fakhoury said. “Courts are busy, judges are busy; they rely on the government in good faith to explain what they’re doing.”

When a federal judge in Texas this year did grasp the technology, he de-nied an application by Drug Enforce-ment Administration investigators who wanted to use a stingray.

“They did not address what the government would do with the cell phone numbers and other informa-tion concerning seemingly innocent cell phone users whose information was recorded by the equipment,” Magistrate Judge Brian Owsley wrote in June. “While these various issues were discussed at the hearing, the government did not have specifi c answers to these questions. More-over, neither the special agent nor the assistant United States attorney

appeared to understand the technol-ogy very well.”

The U.S. attorney’s offi ce in Phoenix declined to comment in response to the most recent case. But federal prosecutors stated in an Aug. 20 fi ling that all they had to do was show how a communica-tions device, in this case an aircard, would provide evidence of a crime. They’re not required to specify how the device would be located, such as with a stingray.

“Defendant was perpetrating a multi-million dollar tax fraud scheme, and he hid his tracks through the use of encrypted emails, money mules, layers of false iden-tities, forged documents, forged identifi cation cards, and botnets and/or proxies,” the fi ling reads. “The alleged inconvenience and intrusiveness of the aircard location operation (which went undetected by an individual who appeared to spend a signifi cant portion of every day seeking to avoid detection or identifi cation) was reasonable under the circumstances.”

“Stringray” also happens to be the brand name for an IMSI catcher offered by the Harris Corp, but it’s also used to generically describe the technology. Other manufacturers offer the devices to law enforcement as well.

Read more homeland security coverage from reporter G.W. Schulz atcenterforinvestigativereporting.org

Civil liberties groups concerned about technology that can track users’ locations

Legal Case Sheds Light on Cell Phone Surveillance Device

Story:G.W. Schulz// Center for Investigative Reporting

Photo:Jason Winshell // Public Press

San Francisco-based civil liberties groups fi led suit to uncover government technology that tracks cell phone locations. The steps of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank downtown serves as a very public venue for a chat.

B8 || sfpublicpress.org || CIVICS | STREET | GREEN | EARTHQUAKE | JUSTICE | ECONOMY || San Francisco Public Press, Winter 2012

ECONOMY SFPUBLICPRESS.ORG

B8 | SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC PRESS, WINTER 2012-2013

T he next time you pass a power pole, consider this: Pacifi c Gas & Electric expects that pole to be there until the year 2357 and perhaps until 2785.

The average PG&E pole has just nine years of useful life left, according to PG&E’s sworn testimony asking for more money to speed pole replacement. The utility got money through rate hikes to replace poles on a 50-year cycle, but it has been replacing them on a 346 to

778 year cycle while, by PG&E’s own testimony, diverting that money to other purposes.

The life cycles of power poles are about as mundane as it gets, but that is exactly what PG&E and other corporate-owned utilities count on as they infl ate profi ts by raising rates while deferring replacement of equip-ment, reducing maintenance and

cutting staff. The result is that you are paying more and more for

less reliable utility service. From 2000 to 2011 PG&E electricity prices rose at more than twice the rate of infl a-tion. The Edison Foundation, which represents investor-owned utilities, said in 2006 that utilities were not making enough profi t and would require increased rates to improve their systems.

Diversions of money from maintenance and repair risk enormous economic damage. Even a one-second interrup-tion can cause billions of dollars of damage, as studies showed after the 1993 blackout in the Northeast and in Canada’s Ontario province.

Beyond that, not taking care of the system literally puts lives at risk. The deadly failure of a PG&E high-pressure pipeline in San Bruno made that obvious two years ago. The pipeline, laid during the Eisenhower years in what was then an open fi eld, ran under suburban homes, its existence unknown to the San Bruno Fire Depart-ment or homeowners. Eight people died, including the state Public Utilities Commis-sion investigator looking into the safety of a PG&E pipeline system that, we now know, is dangerously decrepit.

Paying more for less reliable service while increasing risks to life and limb is part of a much larger story about the remaking of the American economy, a rewriting of laws and rules taking place in plain sight. It is a story the mainstream news media has failed to report.

Quietly, big companies use lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington to rewrite the rules of commerce so they can escape the rigors of competitive markets. Instead of sweeping changes that reporters might actually cover, lobbyists generally keep themselves employed for years by seeking incremental changes, a clause added this year, a regulation revised next year.

The goal is to stay the invisible hand that Adam Smith wrote about in “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776. The invisible hand was Smith’s metaphor for how competi-tion makes economies more effi cient and thus improves society as a whole. Thwart the hand of competition and profi ts rise, but at the price of damaging economic growth and jobs.

Thwarted competition and these new rules explain why Americans pay almost the highest prices in the

world for an Internet so slow and balky that it is the equivalent of a two-lane country road, not the Informa-tion Superhighway for which Americans have paid at least $360 billion in telephone rate increases so far.

America invented the Internet, but in speed it now ranks 29th and falling in the world. Those triple-play packages that cost Americans on average $160 a month including taxes sell for just $38 in France, where the In-ternet is 10 times faster, free long distance extends to 70 countries instead of just two (U.S. and Canada) and cable television offers global, not just domestic, channels.

Imagine the services and products that would be in-vented if America only had the Internet we paid for — the big-volume, high-speed digital pathways that are or will soon be universal in countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore and most of Europe.

As a legal monopoly, PG&E has always been insulated from market forces. As a proxy for the market, California created the Public Utilities Commission. Its duty is to make sure customers pay only what the law calls “just and reasonable” prices while making sure utility owners earn “just and reasonable” profi ts.

When I covered the commission in the 1970s, as a Los Angeles Times national correspondent based in San Fran-cisco, the commission’s staff looked out for the interests of customers as well as utility companies. The com-mission included some members not in the industry’s pocket. And the consumer group now called The Utility Reform Network, or TURN, challenged favored treatment for utilities, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds.

But in the name of “de-regulation” the Public Utilities Commission staff has been cut and hobbled, while the commission itself became so blatantly pro-industry dur-ing the Schwarzenegger years that three of the fi ve commis-sioners had utility industry backgrounds and acted as guardians of utility interests. News coverage of the commis-sion has shriveled to rewriting press releases.

There is, by the way, no such thing as “deregulation,” which in practice means new regula-tion written by industry for

industry and against consumer interests, as my report-ing for The New York Times and other organizations has documented for many years.

The commission became so pro-industry that the staff of one commissioner openly mocked people in Felton, near Santa Cruz, when they complained about price gouging by a corporate water utility. Residents later bought the California-American Water Company system, paying six times the going price just to escape predatory pricing and bad service enabled by the commission.

The public knows little about the ways PG&E benefi ts from this offi cial bias because mainstream news organi-zations seldom cover rate cases until after the amount is set. One exception is The Manteca Bulletin, which gave fl int-eyed coverage to PG&E’s price gouging and the Pub-lic Utilities Commission’s role in helping it pick pockets. Its editor, Dennis Wyatt, even came up with a new defi ni-tion of what PUC means — “Profi ts Upkeep Commission.”

In my new book “The Fine Print,” and my 2008 bestsell-er “Free Lunch,” I show how supposed reforms promoted as using markets to set electricity prices were, from the

get-go, a rigged game to raise prices. In states like California, where traditional utilities

that sold power they generated were ordered to divest most of their power plants, the price of electricity rose 48 percent in real terms from 1999 to 2010. In states that kept the old model, prices rose just 9 percent.

California has 1,400 electric power plants, but owner-ship of these plants is so concentrated that PG&E and fi ve other generating companies can set an artifi cially high price of electricity virtually all the time, research at Carnegie Mellon University showed.

Despite rigging the rules to infl ate prices, PG&E and other utilities have been hollowing out their systems. Money for maintenance and repaid money is siphoned upstream to corporate parents known as holding compa-nies.

Growing risks to utility workers from unsafe condi-tions are ignored despite union complaints and repeated accidental deaths.

“All the gas utility companies are basically playing the odds” on safety, said Charlie D. Rittenhouse, the top safety expert for the Utility Workers Union of America. “They’ve cut the workforces and cut the workforces and cut the workforces while at the same time keeping the CEOs’ and top executives’ wages going up and up and up. A major concern for our group and many other groups we deal with is that there’s not enough people there to do the work” and do it safely.

Rittenhouse and engineering experts I interviewed all predict more pipeline explosions, like the one that destroyed a whole neighborhood in New Jersey during tropical storm Sandy. They note that aging pipelines run under or past schools, hospitals, offi ces and, in the case of San Bruno, a tot lot park. Yet most of these pipelines have never been inspected to see how much corrosion has worn through steel walls built to withstand only 1.4 times maximum pressure.

That you already paid enough to fi nance maintenance and replacement is no barrier to PG&E seeking higher rates, as it is now doing to cover the costs of pipeline upgrades following the San Bruno blast.

Then there’s taxes.In 2008 through 2010 customers paid PG&E enough

money to cover its federal and state corporate income taxes in full, plus the taxes on the profi ts to pay the taxes, known as “grossing up” the taxes. But instead of an actual grossed-up income tax rate of more than 50 per-cent, PG&E received refunds, resulting in a real tax rate of negative 21.2 percent, analysis of company disclosures by the Institute for Economic and Tax Policy found.

In 2011 PG&E set aside $440 million for corporate income taxes, but paid just $42 million, its cash fl ow disclosure statement shows, on $1.3 billion of profi t. That is an effective tax rate of just 3 percent.

That means you paid double — covering the maximum possible tax cost for PG&E in your monthly bills and then, as a taxpayer, fi nancing refunds of taxes the com-pany paid in prior years.

The money you paid to PG&E for taxes that have not yet been sent to Washington and Sacramento — and may never get there — costs you about $48 annually. It is, in economic terms, an interest-free loan you are forced to make to PG&E shareholders each year.

That would not be the case if any of three reforms were in place.

One would be to exempt legal monopolies from the income tax, which since 1954 has transferred a half tril-lion dollars of value from customers to utility owners, a study for the American Public Power Association found. Robert Batinovich, a wealthy real estate developer who

looked out for consumers when he was Public Utilities Commission president and who died recently, advocated this reform in 1977. He said it would simplify rate setting and stop utilities from profi ting off taxes.

The second would be to enforce the Raker Act, which in return for letting San Francisco dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Sierras a century ago required public power in San Francisco. Public power is exempt from corporate income tax and overall charges much less.

The third would be to buy out PG&E, as Manteca citizens are trying to do so they can both cut their power costs and improve reliability. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted in September to sell CleanPower di-rectly to residents, which could, possibly, have the same effect as a buyout if enough people switch to city power. But PG&E and its allies are sure to fi ght in court to keep their monopoly profi ts.

PG&E’s average residential customer now pays $42 a month, or 31 percent, more than the Sacramento Munici-pal Utility District charges. That is more than $500 per year just in higher electric costs.

More PG&E rate hikes are coming for sure. There is the cost of replacing those high-pressure pipelines laid during the Eisenhower years. Starting in about nine years, power pole failures should increase because half of PG&E’s 2.3 million poles will have exceeded their useful life.

PG&E has stepped up power pole replacement from less than 3,000 poles in 2007 to more than 6,600 last year, spokesman Andrew Souvall said and it bought 10,000 more for nonreplacement work. That’s still far short of the 46,000 replacement poles PG&E testifi ed it needs each year.

By delaying pole replacement, PG&E also increased your costs. The price per pole, PG&E documents show, rose from $9,000 in 2007 to an estimated $13,000 next year, which represents infl ation plus $2,600 per pole. That is $6 billion more, just in above-infl ation costs, to replace all 2.3 million poles.

That you already paid to take good care of the system will not matter. But going forward, public demands for reform can save money and improve safety.

PG&E will, for sure, want higher rates it gets to make up for its past neglect to become permanent increases, charges that will continue even after the makeup work is fi nished.

You can minimize that damage. Complain in writing to the Public Utilities Commission. Tell your legislator you want a law requiring PG&E and other corporate utili-ties to match each dollar they spend seeking higher rates with an equal amount for opponents, as former commis-sion lawyer Patrick J. Power recommends. Write concise letters to the newspapers demanding less news on the Kardashians and more on utility company schemes. Call talk show hosts. Sign up with TURN, Women’s Energy Matters and other consumer advocates.

Reform begins with you.

Adapted from “The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use ‘Plain English’ and Other Tricks to Rob You Blind,” by David Cay Johnston. Johnston, a San Francisco native, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and president of the 4,200-member Investigative Reporters & Editors who writes books about hidden aspects of the American economy. He teaches business regulation and tax law at Syracuse University’s law and graduate business schools.

How the ‘Profits Upkeep Commission’ Helps PG&E Pick Your Pocket

Story:David Cay Johnston// Public Press

Photo:Jason Winshell// Public Press

YOUR UTILITY BILL

Paying more for less reliable service while increasing risks to life and limb is part of a much larger story about the remaking of the American economy.

Deferred maintenance has become a profi t center for everyone’s favorite power company. PG&E charges ratepayers to replace utility poles — but does so very slowly. Power lines serve homes in San Francisco’s Richmond District.

Issue 9

Documents

Transcript of Issue 9