Late in January, Chris Daly doused the growing Mission Housing conflict with kerosene when he called a special hearing of the Board of Supervisors' Finance and Audits Committee to examine what he calls the "cultural competence" of the agency. Health-care professionals use this term to describe the art of being sensitive to patients of foreign origin. For Daly, however, it seems to mean that a nonprofit housing developer located in the Mission District should espouse the same leftist revolutionary goals as his friends in that neighborhood.
"You want to talk politics, let's talk cultural competency. Should they be representative of a neighborhood that votes 70 percent for Matt Gonzalez? Odds are, if you walk into a nonprofit, they'll be supporters of me," Daly said last week, by way of directing me to a tape of the hearing.
I think Daly felt the hearing tape would portray him as a small-time version of Sam Dash, the Watergate Committee chief counsel whose questioning made Nixon's hapless co-conspirators look like fools.
To me, however, the hearing more resembled what author Tom Wolfe called a "mau-mau," a piece of intimidation-themed political theater that in San Francisco serves as a bonding ritual between political leaders and their ground troops.
A half-hour procession of SEIU representatives and Mission Housing staffers described supposed nasty working conditions at the agency, which seemed closely related to Wheelock's insistence that employees not be allowed to use their positions as staffers to do the kind of political work they did under Romero. One staffer went so far as to compare these fetters to the work of an Anastasio Somoza, the former Nicaraguan dictator.
After the procession of staffers, Wheelock was invited to speak, allowed a few utterances, then brushed away by supervisors, as if he was a legitimate target of contempt.
Since Romero's firing, staffers and their allies have been calling for the Mission Housing board to resign and be replaced by "community-selected" members -- meaning board members sympathetic to the goals of the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. A year ago, a usual-suspects lineup of progressive Mission District protesters demanded the Mission Housing board resign en masse, so more "progressive" members could take control. Now, this same demand has been incorporated into a corporate ethics crusade, falsely characterizing ideological belief and financial responsibility as one and the same.
Indeed, demand No. 1 of the disgruntled-staffer group (the Committee to Save Mission Housing), as published at savemissionhousing.com, calls for "implementation of sound principles of ethics, transparency, and democratic and inclusive community representation, including new board members based on a previously agreed-upon nomination process, critical board skills, term limits, and conflict of interest reforms."
Ethics and transparency are not the same as "inclusive community representation," which, in Mission-speak, seems to mean "letting our ideological allies have the power."
And in this case, the power is large. If returned to its former role, Mission Housing could exert enormous influence on the development of the Third Street Light Rail corridor. Given the nonprofit's previous, extremely slow-growth stance, such influence could deprive the city of thousands of desperately needed apartments. Wheelock and the board, however, have vowed to fight to the end to keep this from happening.
Unless San Francisco leaders without a political stake in this conflict wrap their arms around Daly and Ammiano and lovingly urge them to back off, the city is going to have to deal with the wreckage of a failed nonprofit agency. Worse, it's going to have to deal with an emboldened group of eastern San Francisco power brokers bent on shaping development in this city in the service of their friends.
