City Hall’s interior, strangely resembling a high-end mausoleum.
I regret to say that I’ve given up on convincing San Francisco to save itself. For almost a decade, I’ve tried to restore the arts community that made this place so fascinating for more than a century, by creating co-op housing and venues for the creative people driven out by the escalated cost of living. They’re the same demographic that gave the city an internationally celebrated new arts movement in almost every decade of the 20th century. We haven’t had a new one since the launch of Burning Man, 35 years ago. The landlords won’t rent to anyone in the gig economy anymore, so even if your career in the arts has met some success elsewhere, you’re not welcome back.
Although I have a 3-page CV of things I’ve made happen for this city and its creative underground, and I’ve tried dozens of innovative possibilities to realize this project, it hasn’t happened yet. It only recently dawned on me why it hasn’t, and why I should just give up on this place. I’m wondering why it took me so long, and if I, too, have a brain filled with plastic micro-particles.
The realization began very recently, after I published an article in a national magazine for city planners about why artists are an asset for cities. Using academic research about how artists improve a city’s mental health, and even life expectancy, historic documentation proving they breed gentrification, explanations of how they upgrade struggling commercial corridors, and other forces they bring to the social fabric, I made a convincing case for how artists are an enormous asset for city planners. https://www.planetizen.com/features/135859-san-francisco-doom-loop-legendary-artist-and-burning-man-founder-knows-how-revive.
Since I was going to a meeting of the Planning Commission anyway, to protest upzoning in my pristine, historically important neighborhood, I decided to send the article to the Planning Commissioners, along with a letter requesting the commission’s help with acquiring some of the city’s hundreds of empty buildings. They voted against it, 4 to 3, with the majority appointees of the former mayor.
I handed solutions to a city in a doom loop, and it didn’t want them. That would have been disturbing enough, but the following week, a highly placed individual in the city treasurer’s office got indicted on corruption charges.
That unleashed a torrent of memories of this city’s sleazy politics, beginning in 2016. My personal recollection goes back farther, to the days of our charming mayor, Willie Brown, who we liked, even though he was the engineer of local pay-to play politics. I’m going back to 2016 because that’s when I started dealing with the city as a nonprofit.
At that time, I applied to the National Endowment for the Arts for funding. They said they’d be happy to fund ArtHouse, if we could partner with the city. I sent the smiling, affable Mayor Lee a letter, which went unanswered. I sent emails, made phone calls, and showed up at his office. He wouldn’t speak to me at all, being too busy giving tech companies sweetheart deals that would ruin the city forever. But in the notorious “Shrimp Boy” Chow case, which uncovered the complex criminal underground of Chinatown, the mayor was cited for taking bribes disguised as campaign contributions. Maybe Ed Lee was only naughty once. We’ll probably never know, since he died in office. However, the subsequently elected mayor, London Breed, did an extraordinary job of making him look good.
In 2017-18, I served on the Civil Grand Jury, in yet another attempt to do something to make life better in San Francisco. (I organized the committee and wrote the report that got in-law apartments legalized.) It gave me access to information sources not available to the public. One of the first outrageous things I learned was that the FBI was about to indict seven of Breed’s appointed department heads on corruption charges. Another was an FBI investigation into a Russian money-laundering operation using San Francisco real estate.
Breed’s department heads did get in trouble for their antics, and more than one got jail time. Her ex-boyfriend, Mohammed Nuru, who headed the Department of Public Works, is still in jail on charges of bribery and taking kickbacks. They were all relieved of their cushy government jobs, and the mayor feigned outrage. Breed’s signature program, the Human Rights Commission, was headed by Sheryl Davis, who signed off on numerous high-ticket contracts to a nonprofit run by the man she lived with. For a wonderfully detailed list of the Breed administration’s corruption, there’s this: https://sf.gazetteer.co/timeline-london-breed-scandals.
The Department of Building Inspection makes other city scandals look petty by comparison. If you’ve ever tried to get a permit from DBI, you know it’s an exasperating wait—unless, of course, you were working with the department’s legendary “expediter,” Walter Wong. You can imagine what it took to expedite. For decades, Wong pushed through people’s projects and got his people promoted, and even though he was debarred from his position and fined what appeared to be a substantial amount, he was only debarred for five years. Writer Joe Eskenazi wrote an excellent piece that describes in detail how absurdly corrupt this city agency has been in the hands of Walter Wong and apparently remains so in his absence: https://missionlocal.org/2021/07/walter-wong-settlement/.
Wong’s colleague in the department, Robert Chun, produced an even more outrageous scandal. In another article by Joe Eskenazi in Mission Local, just below the illustration it says, “Building department engineer Robert Chun kept his job for nearly six years after being federally indicted along with nine other defendants accused of running an international prostitution ring. His official final day of employment was 39 days after he was sentenced.” Later on in the article, we learn that Chun got a raise after his indictment for importing Asian women to work at the 40 houses of prostitution he and his associates maintained in the Bay Area. https://missionlocal.org/2024/04/feds-busted-sf-engineer-in-prostitution-ring-he-kept-his-job-he-got-a-raise/
You might imagine that DBI employees would straighten up after these two highly publicized criminal enterprises, but no. The department seems to retain Wong’s proteges, with more cases coming to light in the last few years. As SFist wrote, “Is the SF Department of Building Inspection the most corrupt government agency in San Francisco? We don’t know for sure, but they sure seem to have the largest number of federal bribery charges of any SF department in recent memory.” https://sfist.com/2023/11/03/two-more-sf-dbi-inspectors-charged-with-bribery-and-shaking-people-down-over-permits/. Note the phrase, “most corrupt.”
This is not to say that there aren’t wonderful people in SF city government. There are, and I have known a lot of them. Most of them stayed as long as they could, did as much good as possible, and fled. Some got voted out by the YIMBY build-build-bulld contingent. There will always be good people trying to make things right.
We lived through these scandals in San Francisco, somehow imagining in our delusional idealism that the last corruption was now gone, and our government was once again championing the good of the people. When Daniel Lurie got elected, many of us thought that it signaled a cleaning house at City Hall. After all, this mayor has so much money that the kinds of grift that changed hands at DBI would be pocket change to him, not worth sullying his reputation.
However, months into his term, Lurie, along with District 3 supervisor Danny Sauter, launched an invasive program to build more ugly high rises in North Beach and other neighborhoods, including along the waterfront, which would eliminate the views city residents had always enjoyed. They stuck the word “family” into the project name to make it sound like a good thing. But in a city with 61,000 empty residential units already, or more, there was no way to justify this atrocity, and the backlash has been tremendous. So maybe Lurie and Sauter aren’t corrupt, per se, and they are just giving their developer friends some work— in which case this would just be a lesser failing of elected officials: cronyism.
Another example of overt cronyism just popped up yesterday, when Supervisor Jackie Fielder raised the alarm that the mayor had just given a contract to a company that scored a lot lower on the investigative committee’s list of options, and cost a lot more than the much better choice. The contract went to Lurie’s friends and donors.
This contract went to a tech company entrusted with increasing the efficiency of the Department of Building Inspection, for $5.9M. But while writing that Civil Grand Jury report in 2018, we pointed out that the efficiency of DBI could be increased at least tenfold by a change in how things got done— forget the baskets and have each office fill out their share of the application at the same time. That would have cost nothing. And at a point when the enshittification of tech is rampant and hackers would just love all that data in permit applications, bringing in tech to do something easily done by better workflow and costing nothing is either idiocy or the mayor’s love affair with tech. He thinks AI is going to improve productivity in City Hall. The mayor obviously doesn’t investigate much and hasn’t heard about the AI bubble. Or tried to use it himself.
Looking back over recent city history made one thing unfortunately clear. This city has been rotting on the inside for too long. Of course, a city where overt corruption was allowed to go unchecked for decades, as at DBI, was going to oppose hot spots of artists living and working together. No one, after all, is better than artists at speaking truth to power. And too many of the powers that be in San Francisco are not interested in a truthful analysis of our issues. They would rather collect grift and watch the city die. What was I thinking.
As for the august organizations doing good work, like providing housing for the marginalized and similar functions, why do they not answer my letters, or enthusiastically promise to help, say they can’t wait to work with me, and then never speak to me again? I’ve had to examine everything I’ve learned about this city in my lifetime here to figure that out.
This is a small city, and it has become even less populous as the cost of living is only reasonable for the few. The elites of the city’s spheres of influence and governance know each other and fraternize at the same events. The organizations doing good work are reliant on the city for various kinds of support, and they also fraternize at the same events. No one wants to champion something the city covertly opposes, like bringing artists back. And who needs artists anyway, when you can always buy their stuff or book them for performances. The exclusionary policy of refusing to rent to the self-employed isn’t even considered when politicians blah blah about making the city fair for all. But most city residents don’t even know this is happening, since there are still a few artists living here to maintain the illusion of a thriving arts community.
So here I am, at the point in time, giving up on saving this city; it is hell-bent on killing itself by eliminating everything about it that was interesting. I am finally recognizing the wisdom in the old adage, “You can’t fight City Hall.”
The ArtHouse project is so much a part of who I am that I can never give up entirely. But from now on, my days will not involve hunting for support in the halls of power. As of today, there will be no more letters sent to officials, foundations, or organizations that might support ArtHouse. They won’t. I don’t qualify for an NEA grant, as I no longer have my own 501(c)3. What I’m proposing is something new, and that requires collaborators with imagination, a quality infrequent in entrenched organizations. Government corruption will probably continue unabated in this remnant of the Wild West.
Now I need to find freer, independent spirits with an Aquarian mindset, like old hippies, who have white elephant real estate sitting empty in the family portfolio. Or they will find me and ArtHouse. Old hippies made a point of getting as much of a good time out of life as possible, and they would be more likely to get the sheer pleasure of building an arty enclave or two to make this city shine again—and for an added plus, no involvement whatsoever with officialdom.
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“But it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one has knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door which one can enter—which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years—and it opens of its own accord.
—Time Regained
Proust Said That 