Economy insight

Okay -- maybe I begin to get it. For the last couple of years, economic surveys have reported that a majority of Americans feel positive about their own financial position, but think "the economy" is going to hell. (That link is a couple of years old, but current opinion research largely agrees.)

Yes -- there has been inflation, but, in general, wage growth has been exceeding price increases to consumers for months so we ought to feel better. And housing has become insanely expensive. But most of us, most of the time, aren't really in the market for housing. So what's the beef?

Today the shrunken San Francisco Chronicle passed along some local data that might be a contributing cause of our discontent. In much of the city, too many neighborhood businesses have not come back from the pandemic. 

Businesses in most S.F. neighborhoods are still struggling to bring back customers. ...

Four years after the beginning of the pandemic, consumer spending in most San Francisco neighborhoods still hasn’t recovered to anywhere near pre-pandemic levels, according to city data.

Citywide, sales tax revenue from April to June this year was down 34% compared to the same period in 2019, adjusting for inflation. In over half of neighborhoods, revenues are down more than 25% compared to before the pandemic, according to a Chronicle analysis of city data.

Actually my home turf, the Mission, is doing a little better than the city at large, down only 25 percent. But it is dotted with empty storefronts like the one pictured above, steps from my house. It sure doesn't feel as if small businesses are thriving.

So, even if we're personally doing okay, we are constantly visually reminded that something is amiss.

Street critters

The alleyways have their residents.

 

Might those guys chase this one if they met?

This big boy just watches the world trudge by.

Department of strange bedfellows

When you are up against the threat of fascism, you have to be willing to inhabit, always uncomfortably, a big tent. 

So these days, I find myself listening to and cheering on Never Trump folks at The Bulwark and elsewhere. They are stalwart at working to defeat Trump and MAGA and they have suffered for their determination. They have lost their tribe; that is a terrible human injury.

Yet they believe so many things I find appalling ... They think Ronald Reagan was a hero of human freedom; I think he was the butcher of Central American aspirations for justice and democracy. They think it's somehow morally wrong to forgive student debt; I think this policy is simply making whole people who've been victims of a con. They applaud Joe Biden's support for Israel's war on Palestinians; I think he's lost the moral thread.

And perhaps most counter-factually in my view, they think the racial reckoning sparked by George Floyd's murder-by-cop was mass violence unleashed. That's just hooey. According to the international Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), researchers concluded that these events, largely inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, were "overwhelmingly peaceful."

The vast majority of demonstration events associated with the BLM movement are non-violent. In more than 93% of all demonstrations connected to the movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity. Peaceful protests are reported in over 2,400 distinct locations around the country. Violent demonstrations, meanwhile, have been limited to fewer than 220 locations — under 10% of the areas that experienced peaceful protests. In many urban areas like Portland, Oregon, for example, which has seen sustained unrest since Floyd’s killing, violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city.

Sure, there were a few places where there was considerable violence -- in addition to a few blocks of Portland, Kenosha comes to mind. 

And there were quite a few locations where polices forces, angry at seeing their free use of excessive force challenged, reacted to protesters with violence of their own. Remember Martin Gugino, the 76-year-old white protester who had his skull cracked by Buffalo police? After video of the incident went viral, two officers were suspended, but eventually returned to duties as if nothing had happened. 

Via El Tecolote

All this is preface for a bit of unfinished business that's become current business here in the Mission. 

A hilltop San Francisco intersection will soon bear the name of Sean Monterrosa to honor the legacy and contributions of the 22-year-old man killed in 2020 by a Vallejo police officer. 

On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution to honor Monterrosa with a commemorative street name at Park Street and Holly Park Circle in the Bernal Heights neighborhood where he grew up. Several neighbors and residents wrote to the board to express their support. 

“Sean Monterrosa had a bright, beautiful, and limitless life ahead of him,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen, a co-sponsor of the resolution. “The passing of this item will help the community heal, serve as a positive beacon for Black and brown youth for whom Sean was a mentor, and remind our city of his great contributions.” 

Monterrosa was killed in a Walgreens parking lot in Vallejo on June 2, 2020, by Det. Jarrett Tonn, who fired five rounds from a Colt M4 Commando rifle from the backseat of an unmarked police truck, records show. A single bullet struck Monterrosa in the back of the head. Tonn told investigators that he mistook a hammer in Monterrosa’s sweatshirt for a gun.

The Vallejo police fired Tonn; he was later reinstated. No charges were filed against Tonn; evidence surrounding the killing did not survive handling by Vallejo Police Department.

That this killing happened in Vallejo should be little surprise according to KQED: 

Between 2010 and late 2020, Vallejo police officers killed 19 people, the second-highest rate among America’s 100 largest police forces.

Can I be excused for knowing with certainty that most of the violence of the summer of 2020 was not done by the supporters of Black Lives Matter? 

Can I work on the same team with people who've imbibed a completely different reality in which mobs trashed America? Faced with the danger to us all, I have to.

Spring in the Mission

I know, it is not even the end of standard time. Spring is officially two weeks away. Yet the coming season is in the air. 

 

The view out my window is wildly lush.

The people gather as well. 

 

San Franciscans demand to be heard.

And on light polls and walls around the Mission, these flyers turn up.

click to enlarge if you want to read.

Odd one this. I'm as little a fan of Mayor London Breed as anyone. 

But these flyers call to mind a long time useful axiom I've developed for understanding San Francisco leftist politics: if somebody seems to be trying to co-opt the legitimate moral energy of your justice movement, run -- don't walk -- away from them. These aren't your friends. They are either bloodsuckers or opportunists. They may be actual enemies of justice or they may be deluded, but they aren't your friends. They are trying to seize the legitimate space you are fighting to open.

Caltrans is ready for the Superbowl

These signs dotted the I-5 all the the way from the Central Valley.

Here in the Mission, bus traffic for tomorrow evening has been re-routed. 

Many experts doubt whether our 49ers can win the game, but the powers-that-be want to be ready. The celebration if we win will be wild. One year, an inebriated sports fan managed to climb and then fall off our roof. No serious damage done, but it could have been bad.

I intend to enjoy the show. The 49ers have given us another year of delicious fandom, win or lose.

Football championship aftermath

Waking up to news that some Americans think their national sport is rigged because one of the players in the winning team is dating a singer who encourages her fans to vote.

What a strange, strange country this is...

— Stu Cameron (@stucam7771) January 29, 2024

 

The fireworks marking the victory of the other winning team went on until 2am in the San Francisco Mission District. Go 49ers!

SFPD picks up a guy smoking in a car on Bartlett Street

Each morning, the street outside fills with parents and children trooping to Buena Vista-Horace Mann school. But not today. Instead, this was the scene.

 

The officer pointing her weapon shouted over a loudspeaker and gestured to a man sitting in a parked car to come out with raised hands.

 

Nothing happened fast and that is a compliment to SFPD. Other officers approached from the side of the car.

 

The cops meant business. We had to hope that nothing scared them.

 

After a few minutes, the occupant of the parked car emerged, stumbling a little but still smoking. 

 

I have no idea what this was about, but I hope there was a real crime involved because this drew a lot of cops and a lot of armament to my 'hood.

 

It feels dumb to watch a thing like this from nearby. Bad stuff can happen quickly. But it also feels as if it is a civic duty to observe ...

Mission District street flotsam

 

It's no mystery what people around here think of the presumptive Republican nominee. 

My neighborhood and my city have been going through a bad patch, but hearts remain in the right place and heads are screwed on right.

When activism is not optional

Chicana feminist and San Francisco Mission stalwart Yolanda M. Lopez passed in 2021; a free exhibition of her art, Women's Work is Never Done, is currently on display within the library at the University of San Francisco.

Lopez's voluminous body of work touched all the struggles of her time:

Moving from San Diego to San Francisco in the late 1960s, she became active in the cause of Los Siete de la Raza, young Latinos charged with killing a police officer who were eventually acquitted with broad community support.

 

Latino Californians were forced during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly by 1994's racist initiative Prop. 187,  to organize themselves to win political power commensurate with their numbers. 

 

Although Lopez eventually won increasing respect for her more sophisticated feminist art, one explanatory panel reminds exhibition visitors that, "at the height of her career she still made ends meet by working at the Macy's gift-wrapping counter." Lopez was a worker.

I found an installation she called "The Nanny" most poignant:

The show will be open daily from noon to six until November 12.

Maybe the library will reopen some day

It feels as if the monumental Mission branch of the San Francisco Public Library has been closed ... forever. Even before the pandemic, plans for closing and renovation were discussed in public meetings. Then came the civic shut down in 2020 and the massive Carnegie building never reopened. SFPL provided a "temporary" branch on Valencia -- but what's with the library?

Yesterday the powers-that-be, headlined by local city supervisor Hillary Ronen, announced that construction would begin on the massive empty hulk. She's a library user too.

 

Mission artist Juana Alicia spoke for our neighborhood's endurance. Her mural, which has been commissioned for the restored main stairwell, will feature images of the nopal, the Mexican cactcus. This prickly fruit serves as an "emblem of resilience and national identity."

The library project was then blessed by the neighborhood Aztec dancers.

At each stage of the renovation project, we've been assured that construction will take 2 years. Will the remodeling be completed by mid-decade? This is San Francisco. I expect delays ...

Strange sight in the 'hood

 

Just another Mission District walker out for stroll. Until you zoom in a little ...

 

What's former President Reagan doing on that guy's leg?

I spend a good deal of time reading/listening to Never Trump (mostly ex-) Republicans these days. They are some of the most insightful folks around on the sad topic of the anti-democratic degeneracy of so much of the GOPer party. In this emergency, the anti-fascist coalition needs everyone. But hey ...

This bunch all seem to have an absolute blind spot when it comes to Reagan. They revere him as a kind of saint. Here was a guy who launched his campaign from the Mississippi locale made famous by the racist murder of three voting rights workers, made war on workers by firing striking air traffic controllers, and spent a term refusing to mention the AIDS epidemic because speaking up might indicate sympathy with dying gay men.

Not a saint to me.

Casting out demons

 

The Mission's own Xiuhcoatl Danza Azteca led a unity rally at 24th Street and Mission on Tuesday evening ...

... calling on Pachamama to heal the violence that has risen up the 'hood with a mass shooting just down the street and in nearby Precita Park.

 

These folks are tireless ...

 

... even when tired. Who here in these streets is not tired of the violence and neglect and sometimes squalor in our beloved Mission after horrors of the pandemic?

We're in this together.

Friday cat blogging

Despite many attempts, I've never gotten a good shot of this feline on its window bed. The animal just won't cooperate with passersby. It's a fine arrangement for an urban cat. 

This photo is ripped off from Mission Local, your essential source for not only the Mission District, but also for the city's less media-attractive neighborhoods in general. Not to mention our dysfunctional,  corrupt city government.

Good riddance

By the time the fourth scooter riding on the sidewalk nearly flattened me during a two mile walk around Mission streets, I'd had it. And then this oblivious idiot came along, looking like a tourist out to turn wheelies among the wild San Franciscans on a busy sidewalk. He was part of a small pack, all looking to be frolicking non-residents.

Go play on your home turf, wherever that may be, and leave us alone.

Heather Knight of the San Francisco Chronicle moans that the Bird scooter company is planning to abandon the city, claiming burdensome regulations. I am completely prepared to believe that the city is miserable to deal with. But I will not miss any scooter company that cuts and runs. These things are dangerous to pedestrians and I have no hope for effective enforcement of any city restrictions. That's just not how things work around here.

What we feel doesn't agree with the numbers

There's all sorts of evidence that the U.S. economy is humming along happily. Many economic indicators say we've recovered from the terrible bottom this fictional entity plunged to during the pandemic. People are working and earning. Heather Cox Richardson wrote last week:

The December jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that job growth continues strong. The country added 223,000 jobs in December, and the unemployment rate went down slightly to 3.5 percent. The last two years of job growth are the strongest on record, and the country has recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic. According to the White House, 10.7 million jobs were created and a record 10.5 million small businesses’ applications were filed in the past two years.

On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that median weekly earnings rose 7.4% last year, slightly faster than inflation. For Black Americans employed full time, the median rise was 11.3% over 2021. A median Hispanic or Latino worker’s income saw a 4.8% raise, to $837 a week. Young workers, between 16 and 24, saw their weekly income rise more than 10%. Also seeing close to a 10% weekly rise were those in the bottom tenth of wage earners, those making about $570 a week. The day after the Wall Street Journal’s roundup, Walmart, which employs 1.7 million people in the U.S., announced it would raise its minimum wage to $14 an hour, up from $12.

All true, but, somehow, many of us find it hard to believe these are good times. 

Economist Paul Krugman has noticed the disjunction between the statistics and what we believe. He asked in the NYTimes, Will Americans Even Notice an Improving Economy?

Political observer Brian Beutler knows something is out of kilter:

The reality of our strong economy has not defined perceptions of it, which have tended to resemble doom-laced political reporting and outright propaganda, rather than raw data gathered by government agencies and other researchers. A huge percentage of Americans believes that the country is in the midst of a recession. [It's not.]

It shouldn't be surprising that the various information media -- even if they aren't in tank for the Republicans -- should overestimate the bad economic news. That's what attracts an audience.

Here in San Francisco, I find it not surprising that people feel the economy sucks. We've been living a tech boom for a decade, so big layoffs in the sector feel scary and novel (and crummy for the people laid off). A young man in our household is part of the collateral damage of tech retrenchment. He'll be able to find another job, but it's tough that he has to.

Further, this city has not fully recovered from the pandemic bust. Downtown S.F. still has North America’s weakest pandemic recovery, reports the Chron.

And out in the 'hood, Mission Street sure doesn't look like it is experiencing a vibrant recovery.

Maybe the vacancies and boarded up storefronts are just normal urban churn, but it sure feels as if something died and has not yet been replaced.

There's no local election this year in which to take out our sense of gloom and doom on our office holders. But 2024 could be something of a local earthquake if the powers-that-be can't help the city feel as if it is humming again.

"Nature red in tooth and claw" on Bartlett Street

 

Neighbors gathered round yesterday to watch a hawk dismember what seemed to have been a pigeon, judging by feathers that floated down from the electric pole. The light fixture made a perfect dining table for the predator. The hawk seemed undisturbed by the audience, just doing what hawks do, per the line from Alfred Tennyson quoted in the title.

On beyond atmospheric rivers ...

The Los Angeles Times reported today on a study whose import is captured in this headline: New Bay Area maps show hidden flood risk from sea level rise and groundwater.

Much of the Bay Area is built on flood plains, natural and human-built, often only inches above the groundwater level. I've long been aware of this from building concrete foundations under existing houses in the Berkeley flatlands in my past life as an earthquake retrofit contractor. 

Sea level rise as a consequence of global warming means more ocean is actually pushing up from underneath current freshwater levels.

I hadn't realized how common this condition was all around the Bay -- the article is illustrated with photos of flooding in Mill Valley.

 

This snippet of map shows particularly vulnerable areas in my part of the city; darker red areas show where the current water table is closest to ground level, but even the yellow areas are only 6-9 feet above current sea levels. As the sea rises, we can expect the low-lying red areas to grow larger and groundwater to break through more often as flooding.

“People still tend to think of these things as isolated terrible things, rather than as part of a collective shift … in what the future might hold,” she said. “We live in nature and too often think of ourselves as separate from it … but nature is still very much in charge.” -- Chris Choo - planning manager for Marin County

Nancy Pelosi steps back ...

The Washington Post has indulged its photographers by publishing two long, beautiful photo essays that chronicle my Congresscritter's extraordinary season of service and party leadership. They are both worth perusing. I hope these links escape the pay wall.

In her own words: Pelosi steps back after decades in charge

A timeline of Pelosi's career in Congress

I want to share my own favorite from among my considerable collection of photos of Pelosi in action here on the home front. Because of her leadership role in a Congress far more conservative than her constituents, she's often been a target of San Franciscans who wanted to get their less-heard policy desires across. She's been brave on important unpopular stances: stalwart on treating China as a dangerous dictatorship and leading Dems in voting against George W. Bush's unconscionable Iraq war of choice. 

But she's been absent on other progressive priorities that a San Francisco Congressperson primarily responsive to constituents might have championed. Many of my Pelosi shots have been of her striding imperviously past screaming pickets.

This picture is a more subtle contribution to that genre.

In 2014, Ms. Pelosi attended a Holy Thursday gathering at St John the Evangelist Episcopal Church convened by Mission District members of Faith in Action Bay Area. Here she speaks from the pulpit. A faithful Roman Catholic, she participated in the ritual footwashing the day prescribes confidently. But even in this context, she found herself verbally challenged by Spanish-speaking residents, their families, and friends about why the Congress and Obama had failed to enact immigration reform and make DACA the law of the land. 

She was graceful, but left abruptly. Despite all her feting by fancy donors and her enormous gift to the city of making the Presidio into parkland, this too has been what Nancy Pelosi's tenure as our Congresswoman has been about: demanding constituents wanting more. 

That's what it has meant to represent this city in Congress -- can we make sure that whoever follows her feels the same pressures? San Franciscans will try.

On skipping the gym

I'm still delighting at being home in San Francisco's Mission District. And still tired. Truck encountered while on a morning stroll.

The morning after the night before

The Mission was hopping last night. The private fireworks shows continued until about 2am.

Carly the Pit Bull needed xanax.

Janeway was less disturbed. She just sought out a lap.