Or, as Silverberg recalls it: "Marc Christensen asked me, and I said, "I won't speak against the project.' And he said, "If you speak in favor of it, it's political suicide.'"
Which is true. And that's why Christensen and Ginella won, in a way. Though they didn't do as much damage as they had hoped to -- we will get the 370 units of housing a block from BART, after all -- their widely publicized anti-housing campaign set the tone for debates that are raging in district supervisor elections all over the city. In most of those discussions the bullying interests of those who would exclude new housing will win, and the silent constituency, the ones who don't yet have a place to live, will lose.
Anthony Pidgeon
Tom Ginella: A nice guy with a troubling agenda.
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"There's an answer, and the answer is simple," Christensen says. "Look at how your supervisors vote. If you care about your city, then you'll vote for someone who cares about the neighborhoods."
We all care about neighborhoods, of course. But in the cynical political vocabulary perpetuated by the Panama neighbors, caring about neighborhoods means keeping out new neighbors.
This kind of nativism is already killing San Francisco. The lack of new housing is driving up rents so high only the rich can afford to live here. The great, diverse, eclectic mecca that was San Francisco threatens to fade into an exclusive domain of the privileged. With district elections, those who would perpetuate this trend, the Christensens, the Ginellas, the neighborhood NIMBYs, tend to have the loudest voice because individual candidates must answer to individual, block-by-block concerns, rather than to the needs of the entire city.
But it doesn't have to be this way. One hopes that someday Tom Ginella looks beyond his Panama Street ranch and perceives this.
A couple of weeks after the supervisors' vote, Tom Ginella drives his black Buick along the waterfront near the new Giants stadium and stops in front of the park. He's lived in this city a long time and recalls when the United Fruit Co. used to unload cargo not far from this spot. He remembers how the China Basin Landing building used to be the biggest edifice west of the Mississippi, back when the phone company processed Yellow Pages for towns around the country. There used to be a bar in the bottom floor. It's been gone for decades.
"This used to be a great city," Ginella says.
He says he's going to start getting rid of most of his cars and trucks parked along Panama Street. "It's time to cull the herd," he says.
After all, it's a public street.
