The Bay Citizen: Change With a Straight Face Barrels Into the Castro

Cartographically true, it refers to the city’s famously gay mecca. But these days, there are concerns that the neighborhood is becoming slightly less bent.

A Different Light Bookstore, which specialized in gay and lesbian literature for 26 years, shut last weekend — the latest in a series of closings of longtime businesses that were gay-owned and operated or catered to gay clientele. The neighborhood is littered with empty storefronts.

Amid this gloom, however, there is one burst of excitement that has crowds lining up, drawing visitors from throughout the Bay Area and beyond: Sunday brunch at Lime on Market.

With “bottomless Mimosas,” the restaurant and club has become so popular that it can take weeks to get a reservation. Patrons regularly defy stanchions and block sidewalks as they wait to cram inside where techno pop music blares at rock concert decibels.

“It’s the only place like L.A. in San Francisco,” a British man said last month as he was shooed inside by the bouncer.

The crowd, to a large extent, is straight.

But even in a part of the city known for anything-goes partying, the scene at Lime has soured some residents and led them to ask, What’s happening to our neighborhood?

Scott Wiener, who represents the neighborhood on the Board of Supervisors, said his office had received a litany of complaints in recent months.

“A lot of extremely drunk people behaving obnoxiously loud, urinating in public, vomiting,” Mr. Wiener said, running through a list of concerns from constituents. “A few accounts of homophobic slurs,” he added, but he thought those incidents were rare and asked that they be played down.

There have also been reports of locals’ casting anti-straight aspersions at Lime patrons.

But most of the frustrations seem to center on the idea that outsiders have invaded the Castro primarily for one reason: to get drunk.

Visits to Lime on several Sunday afternoons in March and April documented a number of incidents: patrons drinking what appeared to be alcohol outside the club; customers so groggy they had to be held upright; people staggering from the club and walking directly into moving traffic; and puddles of vomit sullying the block.

“It’s an issue because of the behavior that’s happening as a result of overserving,” said Andrea Aiello, executive director of the Castro/Upper Market Community Benefit District, a neighborhood improvement program.

For $7, customers can consume unlimited Mimosas (bottomless Bloody Marys are $12) — a recession-friendly offering. Lime is one of several establishments in the city now serving alcohol this way.

Such all-you-can-drink promotions are legal, but “definitely a concern, as is anything that promotes intoxication,” said John Carr, spokesman for the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. “It’s frowned upon.”

The results of this bargain-basement inebriation have overwhelmed some nearby businesses. There have been reports of brawling, and male customers have been spotted relieving themselves on the walls of nearby shops and residences. On Sundays, two businesses have posted “no restrooms” signs to keep tipsy Lime customers away. (The lines can be long for Lime’s restrooms.)

Ms. Aiello said that her organization reached out last month to the club’s owner, Greg Bronstein, to work on resolving the problems, but that he was unresponsive. Mr. Bronstein twice scheduled interviews for this column, but failed to follow through and stopped responding to messages.

Mr. Wiener said he had spoken to Mr. Bronstein and elicited a promise to control customers. On one recent Sunday the club’s exasperated doorman, who looked like a male Grace Jones, was seen struggling to control the crowd to little avail.

Scott?James?is an Emmy-winning television journalist and novelist who lives in San Francisco.
sjames@baycitizen.org

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The Bay Citizen: Running for Mayor, but With Her Money Not in Play

How’s this for a Harvard Business School case study: The Bay Area is renowned for its entrepreneurial culture and the fortunes amassed by its technology elite. But leaders from that world have been notably unsuccessful persuading voters that business smarts qualify them for elective office. (Think Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Steve Westly.)

Can a member of this tribe win an election here?

As she campaigns to be elected San Francisco’s next mayor, Joanna Rees, a moderately successful venture capitalist and a Columbia M.B.A., is determined to prove that the seemingly immutable laws of local politics do not apply to her.

Ms. Rees, a 49-year-old mother of two, has spent the past two years visiting coffee shops and churches and riding Muni buses (in four-inch Chanel pumps) to chat up voters — employment anxiety dominates the conversations — as she angles to break the business elite’s string of electoral losses.

A formidable networker, Ms. Rees has an impressive list of campaign contributors: Mark Pincus of Zynga, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, assorted Pritzkers and Bronfmans and Coppolas, the wife and the sister of former Mayor Gavin Newsom and the musician Quincy Jones.

As Ms. Rees makes her rounds, with a business-friendly message that puts her well to the right on the San Francisco political spectrum, she is winning some support. “She is as smart as hell, a real person, not political,” said James Ludwig, former head of Saks Fifth Avenue in San Francisco.

Impressed by her focus on public-education innovation and her business savvy, Mr. Ludwig recently sent out hundreds of letters on Ms. Rees’s behalf. Hilary Newsom, the former mayor’s sister and president of the PlumpJack Group, has done the same.

Yet Ms. Rees remains mostly unknown. The mayoral race has many contenders, with old City Hall hands — David Chiu, Bevan Dufty, Leland Yee, Dennis Herrera, Phil Ting, John Avalos and Michela Alioto-Pier — crowding the field. In a March poll, Ms. Rees’s name did not even register. The powerful San Francisco Labor Council has not included her among the seven candidates invited to speak to 500 union delegates next week.

Ms. Rees’s problem is money. She has it. (She and her husband, her partner in a venture capital firm that is now being dismantled, live in Presidio Terrace, a gated enclave with uniformed guards.) But she has, as yet, refused to spend it.

Though she stands to collect as much as $900,000 in public financing by agreeing to campaign-spending caps, Ms. Rees herself has not yet contributed a single dollar. And under the campaign-spending caps, none of her well-heeled contributors can give more than $500.

“I am an entrepreneur who bootstrapped my way into the old boys’ club of venture capital,” said Ms. Rees, who is not affiliated with a political party but has contributed to Democratic candidates, including the liberal Senator Barbara Boxer. “I have been down in the trenches with entrepreneurs, rolling up my sleeves, to help turn a small idea into something real.? That is why a grass-roots field campaign is so compatible with who I am.”

“I am raising money the old-fashioned way, supporter by supporter,” she said.

Corey Cook, a University of San Francisco professor who organized a candidates’ forum last week, sees promise for “someone who can really claim to reform from the outside, who is effective on the business side.” However, Mr. Cook notes, “that’s not a message that traditionally plays well in San Francisco.”

And, of course, Ms. Rees cannot win if most voters do not know she exists.

“She cannot just go to bus stops and shake hands with strangers,” said Nathan Ballard, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Mr. Newsom. Mr. Ballard is not involved with any of the mayoral candidates, though he is one of the many local political operatives Ms. Rees has consulted.

“I would advise her to write a big check,” he said. “She needs to help herself.”

And that, even if you didn’t go to business school, is Marketing 101: Under-investing when launching a new product is a recipe for, well, nothing.

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The Bay Citizen: The Small-Time Landlord Versus Tenant Protection

In San Francisco, one of the toughest places in the country to find a place to live, more than 31,000 housing units — one of every 12 — now sit vacant, according to recently released census data. That’s the highest vacancy rate in the region, and a 70 percent increase from a decade ago.

To know one big reason why, ask Wayne Koniuk. By trade, Mr. Koniuk fashions artificial limbs for amputees. By habit, he fits prostheses at no charge for people who cannot pay. This has left him a less-than-wealthy man.

But he does have one substantial asset: a Divisadero Street building that his father, Walter, an orthotist, bought in 1970 and gave to his only son in 2001 so Wayne could run his business on the ground floor and Wayne’s adult children would always have a place to live.

“For eternity,” Mr. Koniuk recalls his father saying, “my grandkids will always have a place they can go. No matter whatever happens, that building should stay in the family.”

Mr. Koniuk, who himself lives in suburban Belmont, gave a half-interest in the building to his older son in 2007 so he could evict a tenant and move in himself. But under San Francisco’s extraordinarily pro-tenant housing laws, landlords can do this only once per building.

So while Mr. Koniuk desperately wants to move his younger son into the building’s other four-bedroom apartment, he cannot. He is exploring legal options. Robert Murphy, who has lived there for 30 years without a lease, remains, paying $525.82 a month.

Last spring, Mr. Koniuk offered Mr. Murphy $45,000 to move out. Mr. Murphy’s lawyer demanded $70,000, a sum Mr. Koniuk says he does not have. Meanwhile, the city’s Rent Board notified Mr. Koniuk that he was allowed to increase Mr. Murphy’s monthly rent this year by $2.63.

Mr. Murphy did not respond to several phone messages left over a two-week period. Harold Jaffe, the lawyer who wrote the demand letter, said he no longer represented Mr. Murphy.

Increasingly, small-time landlords like Mr. Koniuk are just giving up. One of his Divisadero Street neighbors has left two large apartments on the second and third floors of her building vacant for more than a decade, after a series of tenant difficulties. It’s just not worth the bother, or the risk, of being legally tied to a tenant for decades.

“Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”

Perversely, that is hurting the city’s renters as well, as a large percentage of the city’s housing stock is allowed to just sit vacant, driving up rents that newcomers pay for market-rate housing.

San Francisco is a notoriously tough city for small-time landlords. “It is the dream of every landlord to be a landlord in the most lucrative market in the country,” said Ted Gullicksen, head of San Francisco’s powerful Tenants Union. “There’s no sympathy whatsoever.”

Without strong protections, tenant advocates say, only the wealthy would be able to afford to live here. Countless longtime residents, especially the elderly, would be out on the streets.

This is a consensus view in many circles, as illustrated by a recent feature in The San Francisco Chronicle. “Throwing senior citizens out on the sidewalk is never a good idea, but it isn’t stopping North Beach developer Peter Iskander,” it began.

Left unsaid was that one of the article’s featured characters, Carlo Tarrone, pays $450 a month in rent. Or, more significantly, that Mr. Tarrone in 1999 bought (half in cash) a two-unit residential building near Telegraph Hill that the real estate Web site Zillow values at $1.7 million. Mr. Tarrone, whom I interviewed by phone, is by no means poor or facing homelessness.

Mr. Koniuk is not a slick developer who aims to toss widows and orphans into the street. He could sell, but he does not want to. He wants to honor his father’s wishes and allow his own sons to live in his own building.

“My name is Koniuk. My sons’ name is Koniuk. My father’s name was Koniuk,” he said. “We should be able to move them into a building we own.”

 

The Bay Citizen: The Small-Time Landlord Versus Tenant Protection

In San Francisco, one of the toughest places in the country to find a place to live, more than 31,000 housing units — one of every 12 — now sit vacant, according to recently released census data. That’s the highest vacancy rate in the region, and a 70 percent increase from a decade ago.

To know one big reason why, ask Wayne Koniuk. By trade, Mr. Koniuk fashions artificial limbs for amputees. By habit, he fits prostheses at no charge for people who cannot pay. This has left him a less-than-wealthy man.

But he does have one substantial asset: a Divisadero Street building that his father, Walter, an orthotist, bought in 1970 and gave to his only son in 2001 so Wayne could run his business on the ground floor and Wayne’s adult children would always have a place to live.

“For eternity,” Mr. Koniuk recalls his father saying, “my grandkids will always have a place they can go. No matter whatever happens, that building should stay in the family.”

Mr. Koniuk, who himself lives in suburban Belmont, gave a half-interest in the building to his older son in 2007 so he could evict a tenant and move in himself. But under San Francisco’s extraordinarily pro-tenant housing laws, landlords can do this only once per building.

So while Mr. Koniuk desperately wants to move his younger son into the building’s other four-bedroom apartment, he cannot. He is exploring legal options. Robert Murphy, who has lived there for 30 years without a lease, remains, paying $525.82 a month.

Last spring, Mr. Koniuk offered Mr. Murphy $45,000 to move out. Mr. Murphy’s lawyer demanded $70,000, a sum Mr. Koniuk says he does not have. Meanwhile, the city’s Rent Board notified Mr. Koniuk that he was allowed to increase Mr. Murphy’s monthly rent this year by $2.63.

Mr. Murphy did not respond to several phone messages left over a two-week period. Harold Jaffe, the lawyer who wrote the demand letter, said he no longer represented Mr. Murphy.

Increasingly, small-time landlords like Mr. Koniuk are just giving up. One of his Divisadero Street neighbors has left two large apartments on the second and third floors of her building vacant for more than a decade, after a series of tenant difficulties. It’s just not worth the bother, or the risk, of being legally tied to a tenant for decades.

“Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”

Perversely, that is hurting the city’s renters as well, as a large percentage of the city’s housing stock is allowed to just sit vacant, driving up rents that newcomers pay for market-rate housing.

San Francisco is a notoriously tough city for small-time landlords. “It is the dream of every landlord to be a landlord in the most lucrative market in the country,” said Ted Gullicksen, head of San Francisco’s powerful Tenants Union. “There’s no sympathy whatsoever.”

Without strong protections, tenant advocates say, only the wealthy would be able to afford to live here. Countless longtime residents, especially the elderly, would be out on the streets.

This is a consensus view in many circles, as illustrated by a recent feature in The San Francisco Chronicle. “Throwing senior citizens out on the sidewalk is never a good idea, but it isn’t stopping North Beach developer Peter Iskander,” it began.

Left unsaid was that one of the article’s featured characters, Carlo Tarrone, pays $450 a month in rent. Or, more significantly, that Mr. Tarrone in 1999 bought (half in cash) a two-unit residential building near Telegraph Hill that the real estate Web site Zillow values at $1.7 million. Mr. Tarrone, whom I interviewed by phone, is by no means poor or facing homelessness.

Mr. Koniuk is not a slick developer who aims to toss widows and orphans into the street. He could sell, but he does not want to. He wants to honor his father’s wishes and allow his own sons to live in his own building.

“My name is Koniuk. My sons’ name is Koniuk. My father’s name was Koniuk,” he said. “We should be able to move them into a building we own.”

 

The Bay Citizen: Veterans Battle to Regain ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Losses

Mr. Loverde, 32, was discharged from the Air Force in 2008 after revealing to his commanding officer that he is gay. President Obama signed legislation repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” last December, but the fate of Mr. Loverde and some 14,000 other service members whose lives were turned upside down by the 17-year-old policy is unclear.

The Pentagon is preparing to phase out “don’t ask, don’t tell,” possibly by the fall, but the measure revoking the policy was silent on what steps the Pentagon should take regarding service members who were already discharged because of their sexual orientation.

Mr. Loverde, now a photography student at Academy of Art University in San Francisco, is one of three California veterans waging a legal battle against the military in Federal District Court in San Francisco. They have filed a suit that seeks to have them reinstated and to declare “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the “regulations, policies, and guidance that implement it unconstitutional on their face.”

Mr. Loverde, who deployed to Iraq in 2007, said he wanted the Air Force to reinstate him immediately, restore his rank of staff sergeant and give him back his old job as a loadmaster on C-130 aircraft.

“They want to treat us as if we willingly left on our own, but they fired us,” he said. “Our lives were uprooted.”

More than 14,000 service members have been discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” according to the Pentagon. Advocacy groups estimate that 40,000 others were discharged in the decades when there was an outright ban on gays. The Pentagon said it could not provide statistics on the number of service members discharged because of their sexual orientation before “don’t ask, don’t tell” went into effect in 1993.

Many younger veterans, like Mr. Loverde, have indicated they would like to rejoin the military once “don’t ask, don’t tell” is repealed. Others want the word “homosexual” removed from their discharge papers or to have their discharges upgraded from “other than honorable” to “honorable” so they can receive full veterans benefits.

“With the repeal and hopefully the authorization from the Joint Chiefs, I think there will be a flood of people coming to upgrade their discharges, including myself,” said Richard Manning, 65, the first vice commander of the American Legion’s Alexander Hamilton Post 448 in San Francisco, which is composed of gay and lesbian veterans.

Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which brought the suit on the veterans’ behalf, said his organization is continuing the litigation because it has heard from hundreds of veterans discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” who plan to return to the military.

“They are ready to serve their country again,” Mr. Sarvis said.

In court papers filed earlier this month, the Justice Department, which is representing the military, argued that the suit should be dismissed or moved to a special federal court whose jurisdiction is limited to personnel matters.

“We have encouraged the courts to withhold further proceedings in litigation until the executive branch’s certification process is complete,” Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

The repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” will formally take effect 60 days after the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff certify that the military “has prepared the necessary policies and regulations” to carry out the change, and that the shift won’t damage the military’s ability to fight or recruit.

In Congressional testimony, Defense Department officials have said the certification is likely to take place this summer, leading to a full repeal in September or October.

That timetable makes the veterans’ case difficult, said Michael Zamperini, a professor at the Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco.

Last September, a federal judge in another California case declared “don’t ask, don’t tell” unconstitutional and temporarily halted discharges under the policy. That case is under appeal. But Mr. Zamperini said judges are likely to defer to Congress now that President Obama has signed the repeal.

 

The Bay Citizen: Willie Brown Academy, Born in 1992 With High Hopes, Will Close in May, a Failure

But those dreams have been thoroughly dashed, and the 160-student school is set to close May 27, largely as a result of chronic student underachievement and high truancy. And for those unfortunate enough to be a part of its final months, conditions have gone from bad to worse.

Parents, teachers and some officials acknowledge a breakdown in teaching and discipline. Students roam the hallways during class time. One teacher has often shown movies rather than press ahead with science lessons. A pack of students looted the school store, with impunity.

Jonathan Woahn, a seventh-grade math teacher, noted that few top district leaders had set foot in the school after announcing last year that it would close.

“The kids rule the school,” Mr. Woahn said. “I think administrators just want us to hold on through the rest of the school year; there are no expectations beyond that.”

Marylin Taylor, whose son Romeo Reeves is an eighth grader at Willie Brown, agreed. Ms. Taylor said staff members took an indifferent approach not only to students, letting them run through the hallways and “holler,” but also sometimes to parents. She said she had left two messages recently with the principal’s office to discuss her son’s academic progress but had not received a return call.

“My son was unable to live up to his highest potential at this school,” said Ms. Taylor, a nursing staffing coordinator. “I am so happy that he won’t be attending that school anymore.”

Patricia Gray, an assistant superintendent in the San Francisco Unified School District, said administrators had persevered.

“It is not ideal,” Ms. Gray said, “but the alternative to doing what we are doing now was to close the school in December, which would have displaced the kids midyear.

“Learning is the main focus. Now, how much of it is happening? It’s difficult at this time. But we have not given up.”

Jill Wynns, a school board member, said the district had tried mightily to raise student achievement. But the school has languished in recent years and been judged harshly under the rules of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

When the federal government granted the district $45 million last year to improve its worst-performing schools, the district moved to close Willie Brown — in part because its facilities were crumbling. Officials hope to build a new school in its place.

“Do I think we have done the best job we could at that school in recent years?” Ms. Wynns asked. “No. That’s why I think it’s time to go on to the next opportunity. In this case, the next opportunity we have is closing the school.”

 

The Bay Citizen: City’s Art Is a Victim of Neglect, Damage and Loss

But management of the collection — which many local residents would be surprised to know even exists — is so slipshod that the city cannot say for sure how many pieces it owns. Some pieces have been damaged because of lack of maintenance or moth-ridden storage spaces; others have disappeared entirely.

The San Francisco Arts Commission, the city agency responsible for the collection, is especially poor at tracking its unusually large collection of around 2,500 portable works — paintings and other pieces that are supposed to decorate public spaces and buildings.

In one case, the city acquired 496 art objects for San Francisco General Hospital when it was renovated in 1972. By 2007, a floor-by-floor inspection turned up only 49 works — 10 percent of what was supposed to be there. Subsequently, more works have been discovered, but the city has yet to confirm the location of 141 pieces.

A big chunk of the city’s Modernist jewelry collection is also missing. A 2008 survey showed that of the 58 pieces in the collection, 19 were lost.

Since the Civic Arts Collection’s inception in 1932, a full survey of the city’s holdings has never been done. A complete inventory, encompassing sculptures and monuments and other stationary works in addition to the portable collection, is under way, but until its scheduled completion in late 2012, the city can only guess at the collection’s size.

Allison Cummings, senior registrar for the collection, began work on the inventory in 2009. She estimates the total number of works at 4,094 (including duplicates and large pieces comprising several smaller pieces).

Nearly one-quarter of the collection, an estimated 905 pieces, is in storage, while the rest is scattered around parks, hospitals, offices, courtrooms and other public city-owned spaces.

When asked about the number of pieces that could be damaged or missing, Luis Cancel, director of cultural affairs for the arts commission, said, “It is impossible for us to estimate or even comment on an inventory process that is presently ongoing.”

Upon request by The Bay Citizen, the city sent a partial list of its inventory, with 2,673 items of stationary and portable works. Many of the fields, like “dimension,” were unfilled, and question marks were sprinkled throughout. “The PDF files are the most complete record we can provide at this time,” said Kate Patterson, public relations manager for the arts commission.

The commission declined to provide locations for the items listed in the portable collection, citing security concerns.

Public and private arts institutions struggle with collection management, but throughout its history, San Francisco has allocated few resources to caring for its art

The job of collections manager (now called senior registrar) was not created until the 1980s; before that, no one person was in charge. The position was vacant from 2004 to 2007, when Ms. Cummings, a veteran of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other museums, was hired. She found that the city’s records “weren’t in as good a shape as they should have been.”

Now the Civic Art Collection’s care falls to three people: a full-time registrar, a part-time registrar and a project manager.

By contrast, Seattle, whose city art collection also contains thousands of portable works, has five full-time and four part-time employees in charge of public art. It also maintains an active database of its collection and does a complete inventory every four years, according to Ruri Yampolsky, director of the public art program for the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs in Seattle.

“We’re really careful to make sure we know where everything is,” Ms. Yampolsky said.

San Francisco’s large portable collection is mostly a remnant of the city’s art fairs from 1946 to 1986, which were held to support local artists. As a result of these offbeat fairs and other purchases, a catalog of the collection’s portable items reads like the packing list of an eccentric millionaire: world-class paintings by Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn are listed alongside jewelry, ceramic bowls and bolts of fabric. There’s even textile art — a wool skirt and a white leather jacket.

Now art is acquired through the Art Enrichment Ordinance. Enacted in 1969, it mandated that 2 percent of civic construction costs go toward acquiring public art. Because city finance laws do not allow bonds to finance maintenance, however, very little goes to the collection’s care.

awright@baycitizen.org;
rharmanci@baycitizen.org. Sydney Lupkin contributed reporting.