The goal of the campaign, at the time of this writing, is to qualify an initiative for the November ballot that will mandate an $8.50 minimum wage in San Francisco. We started gathering signatures on Saturday, June 21st and must have 10,000 valid signatures from registered San Francisco voters by July 7th. We plan to gather 17,000 to 20,000. At the same time we are gathering signatures, we are handing out donation envelopes, asking everyone to send in whatever they can. A lot of small donations add up to big bucks. Even though polling shows that this is a very popular issue with San Francisco voters, it will still take money to run the campaign.

The following text is taken from the title and summary of the initiative prepared by the City Attorney. It appears on each one of the petitions.

The State of California requires most employers to pay a minimum wage of $6.75 per hour. The City of San Francisco requires employers that receive City contracts to pay their employees a minimum wage of either $9.00 or $10.25 per hour, depending on whether the employer is an nonprofit or for-profit business.

This ordinance would require that all employers pay a minimum wage of $8.50 per hour for work performed within the geographic boundaries of the City. The minimum wage requirement would apply to employees who work two or more hours per week. Each year the City would adjust the amount of the minimum wage based on increases in the regional consumer price index. This ordinance would exempt small businesses (businesses with fewer that ten employees, including temporary and part-time employees) and nonprofit corporations until January 1, 2005. Starting January 1, 2005, small businesses and nonprofits would pay a minimum wage of $7.75 per hour. Starting January 1, 2006, small businesses and nonprofits would pay the minimum wage of $8.50 (as adjusted based on increases in the regional consumer price index).

Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez has been the leading proponent of a San Francisco minimum wage. It was through his support that a study on the economic impact of raising the minimum wage was commissioned last summer by the Board of Supervisors. The study shows that 50,000 workers will benefit from this legislation. At the same time, the overall impact on the San Francisco economy will be small. Most employers already pay their employees more than $8.50 per hour. Of those that do not, most will have very modest increases in their cost of doing business — less than 3 to 5%. The economic impact study can be found at: http://iir.berkeley. edu/livingwage/

What can you do to help qualify this initiative for the ballot and ensure that it wins in November?

• If you are reading this before the July 7th deadline for turning in signatures, help gather signatures.
• Help spread the word. Show this article to everyone you know — friends, neighbors and coworkers.
• Help to raise the money to win this campaign. We have 20,000 donation envelopes that will be distributed in the community. A LOT OF SMALL DONATIONS ADD UP TO BIG BUCKS. For those of you who are working, we are asking a minimum donation of one hour’s worth of wages. If you make $6.75 an hour — send in that amount. We will know that you are with us. If you make $50 per hour, you will know that you are making a significant contribution that will enable thousands of workers to meet basic living expenses for food and shelter. For those who are very well off, we have included an option on the donation envelope for donors to contribute the equivalent of their wages for a day.
• Volunteer your time. I have donated a portion of my office for the campaign headquarters. Stop by (742 14th Street — near Church and Market) and ask what you can do to help. The temporary phone number of the campaign is 415-255-9494.

Recent poll results of likely San Francisco voters shows that this campaign has broad community support. People understand that $6.75 is not enough.

Morality is a term that’s been co-opted by those in the US whose politics tend to do the greatest harm to the most people. Those of us who are queer, who struggle with addictive substances, who are broke and on the dole—those of us who are not the successful or the pure by this society’s standards—are denied access to moral judgment. We are burdens on society. We are corrupters of youth. We are the fallen. On June 5, religious leaders representing Jews, Friends, Catholics, Buddhists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Muslims, Pentecostals, and Lutherans sent the political leaders of San Francisco a very different message: “One’s moral compass always points toward compassion. These religious leaders are far from alone.

On June 2, Mayor Gavin Newsom introduced a budget that will bring the hurt down upon the poorest San Franciscans. Among the services to be eliminated by this proposal would be Tenderloin Health, which serves 16,000 homeless people with basic respite and quality of life services every year; the Ella Hill Hutch Homeless Shelter, which provides over 100 indoor sleeping spots each night; Caduceus Outreach Services, which reaches mental health consumers who are unable to use the mainstream mental health system; and the SRO Families United Collaborative, which provides services for approximately 500 families living in single-room occupancy hotel rooms in four different city neighborhoods. These are only the housing- and homelessness-related cuts. Homeless people share the burden with queers, with seniors, with children and their families, with people with disabilities, and with the chronically ill. It always sounds hyperbolic when we say that certain measures will result in deaths, but it must be understood that we are talking about the most vulnerable populations in San Francisco. What will it mean for HIV positive people not to have wrap-around services? What will it mean for ill homeless people to lose the largest basic respite provider in the Tenderloin? This budget is brutal, callous, and morally reprehensible.

This evening, June 11, representatives from several different community organizations, as well as members of the community at large, brought this message to Mayor Newsom’s front door… literally. Through street theater and protest art, they sent forward a message which could be summed up in one of the chants: No budget cuts! The city belongs to us! More than one neighbor came out briefly to let us know that they didn’t like having this sort of individual in their neighborhood either. Of course, at the Coalition on Homelessness, we cannot fully stand behind NIMBYism.

While some members of the Board of Supervisors have already openly recognized that these sorts of cuts are irresponsible, if not downright obscene, there is still work to be done to ensure that San Francisco passes a budget which honors our government’s responsibility to all our communities. Next Thursday, the Budget and Finance Committee of the Board of Supervisors will allow public comment on the 2008-2009 budget at 5:00 p.m. in Room 250 of City Hall. We encourage all readers of the Street Sheet to join us in arguing for a municipal budget guided by a true moral compass.

Some highlights of the devastating impact of the budget include:

1. Closure of Ella Hill Hutch Shelter, which serves up to 100 people every night in the Western Addition.
2. Closure of Caduceus Outreach Services, a mental health treatment and wrap-around support program for severely disabled homeless adults with co-existing addictive disorders.
3. Almost total elimination of SRO Families United program (66% cut) for families with dependent children living in hotels.
4. Cut of 22% to residential substance abuse and mental health treatment programs budgets.
1. Removal of support from Conard supportive housing program for severe psychiatric disabilities.
2. Closure of Cortland Acute Diversion Unit for individuals in psychiatric crisis.
3. Loss of 12 out of 24 community-based medically-supported detox beds.
4. Many more residential cuts yet to be determined.
5. Cut of 30% to all outpatient substance abuse and mental health treatment.
6. Almost total elimination of STOP treatment program.
7. 1,600 people will lose psychiatric treatment through Private Provider Network.
8. Closure of Tenderloin Health, homeless multi-service center in the Tenderloin serving over 300 people a day, 16,000 unduplicated people a year. This program provides health services, HIV case management, HIV prevention, mental health services, harm reduction work, improving quality of life by getting people out of rain, hygiene kits, bathrooms, snacks, crisis intervention, and 30,000 shelter reservations a year.

What Can We Do?

Protest Newsom’s proposed budget!

Where:

The Bellaire Tower building—home of Mayor Gavin Newsom (1101 Green Street, at Leavenworth Street)

Bus 45 (Leavenworth/Union stop), Bus 27 (Leavenworth/Jackson stop), Bus 12 (Pacific/Leavenworth stop).

When:

Wednesday, June 11, 6:00 p.m.

The current hot trend in addressing homelessness in the United States’ cities is, once again, to remove panhandlers from downtown corridors. Lately the Bush administration—through its Interagency Council on Homelessness—has lauded Denver, Colorado and its ten-year planning process for coming up with one of the 20 “Major Innovations” this year. This major innovation that President Bush is so enamored with? Have people put change in old parking meters that the City then collects for the United Way, rather than giving alms directly to people who are panhandling.

Clearly another case of “Mission Accomplished!”

These panhandling meters are to homelessness what weapons of mass destruction were to the invasion of Iraq: a public relations ploy to achieve a government policy objective. Just as the Iraq invasion was really about oil for multinational corporations, these dumb-ass meters are really about removing poor people from downtown commercial areas. Denver officials told the SF Chronicle that the meter program there has not been lucrative, but panhandlers have seemed to disappear where they went up. Not to be deterred by facts, Team Bush has declared amazing results in Denver: $15,000 raised and a 92% reduction in panhandling. Plans are to get, “more businesses to adopt meters,” (at $1,000 a pop), and to hire local artists to spiff them up and make them more, “visible and attractive,” which—when you think about it—raises an interesting question: If the initial crop of meters got rid off 92% of the panhandlers, why do a nicer, prettier version? Wouldn’t a pit bull design be more appropriate for that hard core 8% with the audacity to still be in public space?

Not concerned with contradictions and inconvenient facts, other cities are following suit. Baltimore installed some panhandling meters with similar, “no money but damn, those immobile inanimate objects sure do scare away panhandlers!” results. And now San Francisco has announced plans to launch yet another in a long line of anti-panhandling campaigns, following this, “innovative model.”

Cities and people are vexed with the realities of increasing income disparities and homeless-ness, but has the Bush administration developed any meaningful or substantive policy plans to address either income disparity or homelessness? Besides spending the past seven years requiring local communities to write Ten-Year Plans to End Chronic Homelessness while gutting funding for affordable housing and treatment services, what the heck have these guys done?

They write blank checks to the military-industrial complex, putting us all in massive, never-before-seen levels of debt. They dole out Corporate Welfare that would require all of us spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, putting all our money into panhandling meters to match even a fraction of. They are currently working in Congress to redefine the Federal definition of who is homeless, so as to reduce the U.S. population of homeless people down to the 700,000 people they claim it to be (the 900,000 children listed as homeless in our Public Schools by the Department of Education will disappear quicker than the panhandlers in Denver), and they bail out the bankers while millions of middle- and low-income people are losing their homes to foreclosure.

Team Bush praises spare change panhandling meters as an “Innovative Solution” to homelessness, and they spend millions of dollars flying their henchman around the country to promote this and other “innovative” ideas like using police officers as outreach workers. It’s ironic. The Feds created homelessness with draconian cuts to subsidized housing, and now it’s the local governments that are panhandling with meters and arresting homeless people for sleeping outdoors.

San Francisco is faced with a $300 million deficit, and has told service and treatment providers to anticipate a 20 to 30% reduction in the number of clients they will be able to serve next year. Many public health and homeless programs that have been serving thousands of poor people every year will be forced to close. Yet six months ago the Mayor found $200,000 to invest in a Homeless Coordinator who needed to do something or risk being seen as irrelevant in the face of these serious budget cuts. Presto! An innovative new idea, “to see if we can save some lives out there.” Panhandling Parking Meters! Now the Mayor’s office wants another $500,000 for two holding cells (i.e., jail cells) in a new “Community Justice Center” to detain people arrested for minor, nonviolent offenses (e.g., panhandling).

Don’t believe for a second poor people just suddenly “disappear” with these seemingly innocuous little anti-sleeping, anti-panhandling, anti-loitering programs: Local jail cells are overflowing with them.

“Mission Accomplished,” my ass.

Some day soon take yourself a stroll from Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza down the east side of Telegraph Avenue. Thread through students and shoppers past a couple of blocks of funky bars and stores. Soon, you will come to Rasputin Music, the flagship of nine Bay Area music outlets. There, in the windows at 2401 Telegraph, you will encounter a colorful experiment in “counter-education.”

Rasputin offers window displays featuring Japanese internment camps, disability rights, Black Panther history, and, as of this writing, homeless art.

Chief Financial Officer, Jonathan Fernandez, 41, and Assistant Advertising and Promotion Director, Alle Emershaw, 24, with the full support of Rasputin owner and President, Ken Sarachen, provide Berkeley visitors and residents with ever-changing window displays inspired by Berkeley organizations unassociated with the University.

Jonathan told me that owner Sarachen, “was so nice that he let me take over all of the windows on Telegraph Avenue and is allowing me to build a Berkeley History Museum on the mezzanine.” In addition, “he is constructing a new building on the corner where he wants to put a ‘Free Speech Movement in Berkeley’ Research Facility”—separate from academia—using, “an amazing amount” of Berkeley historical documentation that he had collected.

Jonathan loves Street Spirit and hands it out at the counter. Because of this, when Christine Hanlon was featured in a Spring 2007 issue, he directed Alle Emershaw, whom he calls, “a miracle worker,” to create a window display of Hanlon’s artwork.

The second print exhibit Alle created was inspired by the April 2007 issue, dedicated to Art and Activism, displaying prints, posters, paintings, drawings by several artists, and Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) informational collages that demonstrate the connection between homelessness and defunding of affordable housing. Alle culled quotes from Street Spirit and enlarged them for the display along with artists’ website addresses.

After buying this issue from a homeless vendor outside Black Oak Books, Jonathan realized some artists, “seriously care about people,” and are not, “self-centered, ‘I-want-to-be-a-great-artist-and-get-a-million-dollars-for-my-paintings’ people, which really surprised me.”

To show there are many artists concerned about homelessness, “We tried to get the largest number of people we could” in the available space.

“I think people take fine art seriously enough that students and visitors walking by will re-think their position on homelessness because these people we revere called, ‘fine artists’ take a particular position on homelessness.”

Jonathan noted Matthew Behnke’s photo of the shopping cart arch sculpture in the Albany Landfill community now destroyed for a running path. “That really hurt.”

Art Hazelwood (whose work is featured on page 5 of this issue of the Street Sheet), “ties freedom of speech and homelessness together” for him.

Alle Emershaw’s artful display of works by Arnold White, Jonathan Burstein, and Attorney Osha Neuman, and Malcolm McClay’s photos of numbered preventable homeless deaths march across the windows.

Do adjacent businesses complain about the homeless art exhibit or Johnny Allen Shaw’s video, My Big Fat Homeless Berkeley Movie? Jonathan laughed. “If I put ten homeless people along my windows,” (he considered hiring some), “that would hurt business.” A homeless art show is distant and safe.

On Friday, April 25, 2008, when I walked into his roomy second floor office, Jonathan was viewing several non-profits’ Websites, possibly for future window projects. He reported that the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) has raised millions of dollars for orphans from wars occurring in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. MECA’s website, reports, “We educate North Americans [about] the brutal impact of US foreign policy on [these children’s lives].”

Jonathan recently attended a MECA event at the College Avenue Presbyterian Church. Photography was displayed. Poets traveled from SUNY Buffalo to read. A 17-year–old Berkeley High School musician performed. “I have some understanding of music from working here, and he was incredible! I walked in not knowing what to expect. I left with tears running down my face. It was so beautiful. [The MECA project] is going to be a set of windows.”

Another display may highlight the work of Rosemary Stasek, former Mountain View City Council member and mayor who traveled first to Afghanistan after the Taliban were pushed back. Ms. Stasek, a friend of Jonathan’s, raised money to educate Afghani women. She set up schools in tents so that if the tents were blown up, other tents could be purchased for a few hundred dollars, and school could resume. “She is brilliant and does amazing things with her life.”

I asked Jonathan what motivated these displays.

“The huge amount of ignorance about what is going on in the world [understood] in a humane, loving, caring way.” News analyses reduce such issues to statistics and don’t present a human face. People don’t understand the humanity behind world problems.”

It, “breaks [his] heart” that students walking up and down Telegraph Avenue have no idea or consciousness that the freedoms they exercise, take for granted, and are so willing to give up didn’t exist 30 years ago.

Berkeley is more conservative than when he came in 1988. “If you make people pay $30,000 yearly for college, you won’t get people willing to take chances with their education.” As people age, they often acquire private property. This sometimes makes them prone to conservatism, exploitation, and support of the status quo, plagued by fears that “dirty” homeless people who do scary things will drive out business.

Jonathan told me his purpose was to create a series of, “educational projects.” “As the students walk to UC Berkeley, I want them to learn something they aren’t learning at the University—more real than any class they are going to take.

“The first exhibits I did were photographs of Telegraph Avenue, the street they walk on every day, and what the students were doing that many years ago.” He contacted photographers asking them to print undeveloped negatives from the ‘60s.

“Berkeley is the greatest educational community in the world.” However, many independent Berkeley educational organizations began, “as a counterpoint to the University,” in the ‘60s with SLATE, the new student left, precursor to the Free Speech movement, dedicated to ending nuclear testing, stopping capital punishment, and ensuring civil rights.

Michael Rossman, president of the Free Speech Movement—“an amazing human being and educator,”—encouraged Jonathan: “Rossman spent his whole life doing education outside of the system.” When a photographer told Jonathan that Rossman resided in Berkeley, Jonathan’s phone call prompted an invitation to Rossman’s house. Meeting Rossman a couple of years ago, “changed my life.” Rossman knows how to motivate people, “to think more clearly.”

Another inspiring individual, Ken Stein, “created an amazing window display on the disability rights organization, the Center For Independent Living. We called it ‘Berkeley’s Other Revolution.’”

Jonathan learned that at one time people at UC Berkeley with disabilities were not allowed to attend classes. Students with disabilities, lacking access, were locked in one residence hall. “They were going to the University, but they couldn’t go anywhere.”

What kind of person creates educational window exhibits on issues like disability and homelessness that break the mold for surrounding businesses?

Jonathan grew up in Claremont near Los Angeles and was conditioned to live out the American Dream.

After Harvard undergrad, the bastion of open debate where the administration let students explore any project they chose, Jonathan was accepted to Boalt School of Law. He imagined he was coming to a liberal place where people seeking meaningful lives attended law school because it was in Berkeley. “All I met there were people who wanted to be rich corporate lawyers or prosecuting attorneys.” Devastated, he quit.

Though he worked successfully in several businesses, with two small children, he started making tie-dye for extra money. Every weekend, he stood on the street talking to people. “Somehow it changed the person I was” into someone who was “trying to be helpful and supportive to the homeless people on Telegraph. There are a lot of vendors on the street who help homeless people every day [by employing them].”

“I found that the people on Telegraph were sweet people with interesting things to say, and they have problems” he couldn’t solve. He could, however, help with small acts that improved their lives.

Jonathan described his personal journey toward developing empathy—using creative thought to stand in the mind and heart of another, imagining how they feel or think. Suffering through a harmful, unhealthy relationship, he contemplated suicide.

Instead, he began developing an unusual level of compassion and caring for marginalized people and those living on the street. He began expressing the positive things he wanted to feel—love and kindness towards people. “Because I was hurting a lot, I could recognize hurt in others. I wanted to care for that hurt.”

He could understand how, as an adult, someone could be mentally wounded, ending up hopeless, too depressed to go to work.

“If you take the time to know the person a little, you are treating them like a human. Once you remove them from a category, like ‘homeless,’ you have to deal with exactly who they are—people just like you. They didn’t have opportunities you had. But, whatever happened, they are homeless. That could be you.”

I thanked Jonathan and Alle for their generosity in creating this display.

Said Jonathan, “Generosity only happens when it hurts. When you’re giving something you really need, that’s when you’ve been generous. If you’re giving something that you have in abundance, and it’s easy for you, you’re not being generous. You shouldn’t even be thanked for it.

“I’ll let you know when I’m doing something generous.” This effort seemed to Jonathan “a Nothing.”

“Rosie Stasek going to Afghanistan and [helping] people with her whole life and being—That’s Something!

“It hurts that this is the world we’re in,” he said.

Seated on Cathedral steps bathed in a golden glow, Jonathan Burstein’s homeless man seems to ponder that sentiment.

With the excuse that the projects are decrepit, and claiming that they will be “refashioned” into denser neighborhoods, the powers that be have slated countless tenants of Westside Courts in the Western Addition, Potrero Terrace in Potrero Hill, and Sunnydale Projects in Visitacion Valley for evictions.

According to the article, the new agreement is between the Housing Authority and construction companies. The money for the “renovation” would come from both private and public funds.

The article says the quantity of public housing units will remain the same with the addition of, “hundreds of new affordable and market-rate rental units and homes for sale to help offset the costs.”

It is estimated that there will be 3,000 units in the new neighborhoods.

In the shelters, there have been numerous cases of folks of color and youth and senior citizens evicted from apartments and single-resident occupancy hotels (SROs) under similar circumstances. The so-called “justification” was renovation with broken promises of the right to return.

Some of those people who formerly rented in apartments slated to be upgraded now, in actuality, live in SROs—that is, if they are lucky. Many, including many residents of SROs, now panhandle to survive in the streets. Some of these, as well as many others, are homeless or have been forced to leave the city.

Because of the upcoming inevitable crisis of capitalism, cities throughout the nation are closing down public housing: in Atlanta and New Orleans, for example.
During a time of economic and political upheaval, it’s smart, if detestable, policy for those in power to use government apparatus to move the economic and political fighters away from the city, the historical center of political activity for the working class, and the centers of the greatest discontent.

Try saying this without laughing: “Homeless parking meters.”

Thought you couldn’t.

Images of dispossessed meters, probably jumping on freight trains and living in hobo encampments like a scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou? are easily conjured. Actually, these meters, donated by San Francisco’s parking department and painted orange, are the latest instruments the city wants to use to dissuade people from donating spare change directly to the unhoused—and keep panhandlers out of sight.

The nickels, dimes and quarters that go into them would instead be disbursed to agencies serving homeless people. This oh-so-bright idea got Page One treatment in the San Francisco Chronicle on May 13.

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said she thought the story read like a parody from The Onion. A photo of local homelessness czar Dariush Kayhan leaning on a model meter accompanies the story.

The intent is to prop a dozen meters along touristy stretches of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue in hopes of getting out-of-towners and locals to plink coins in them. The message on the meter would read, “Be a part of change, don’t give change.”

In 1998, the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro posted a similar message in participating stores: “Create change. Don’t hand it out.”

My, what clever wordplay.

In 2003, the Hotel Council funded a slick campaign using billboards that equated panhandling with perpetuating drug abuse and social diseases. One sign read, “Today I did Tai Chi, donated some change and helped spread STDs.”

Are you splitting your sides yet?

Denver is one of six US cities with these homeless meters. This city—which figures its local homeless population to be at least 3,90—installed them last year.

How much did they yield? About $15,000. Considering it takes up to $54,960 by the Providence Network’s estimates to maintain one homeless person with food, shelter and emergency services, that kind of take sounds like chump change.

Before San Francisco starts this nickel-and-dime operation, the city needs to figure out its cost-effectiveness. How much would installation cost? Will parking enforcers be on the clock when they empty the meters?

How much would the PR director of such a campaign charge?

Better yet, how about promoting real change instead of just collecting it?