Lacking (Progressive) Definition

This dissonance has manifested in the listlessness with which progressives have approached the Nov. 6 mayoral election.

Progressive Svengali Randy Shaw, the executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, author of The Activists' Handbook, and anointer of politicians worthy to use the progressive name, has published missives recently in his online journal Beyond Chron questioning whether it's really necessary to oppose Newsom this fall. These polemics don't mention, for some reason, the fact that the policies of the current mayor have led to a tremendous increase in Shaw's influence over city funds. To carry out the mayor's promise to give the indigent housing and other services — instead of cash handouts — Newsom has accelerated a program by which the city and Shaw's organization arrange to lease flophouses from slumlords. This means renting to fewer impoverished tenants who used to come in off the street, and to more impoverished tenants from waiting lists. This hasn't added significantly to the number of rooms available to the indigent. It has led to an inflation of prices for ordinary flophouse rooms, leaving many streetbound. Whatever its failures, Care Not Cash has increased Shaw's power. In practice he's now one of the city's biggest landlords, with more than 1,200 units under management.

"There are many convincing reasons why progressives should not expend resources trying to unseat Mayor Newsom in November," Shaw wrote on May 23.

You don't say?

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The city's self-named progressives are similarly hamstrung in coming up with solutions to city problems.

The city's left wing, like the mayor, is eager to bemoan the Calcuttalike nature of our public housing. Progressives are equally loath to confront the public-sector unions whose work rules and pay rates have contributed to public housing's decay.

This discomfort with the idea of confronting union leaders also enfeebles progressives' ability to address issues such as crime, quality of life, and public corruption. San Francisco police detectives collectively are some of the worst in America when it comes to solving murders. It might be possible to improve this record by changing police department workplace rules, which now call for promoting detectives based on seniority instead of performance. That idea's DOA because it would mean confronting the Police Officers Association.

The city's abuzz with corruption allegations involving neophyte Supervisor Ed Jew. But that's a public integrity sideshow compared with more entrenched city leaders. S.F. Airport Commission President and Labor Council Vice President Larry Mazzola is under federal investigation for flushing tens of millions of workers' benefit-fund dollars into a Lake County resort that adjoins his family's estate. There hasn't been a whimper of complaint among San Francisco progressive politicos. Could this be because Mazzola happens to lead the local Plumbers union?

San Franciscans, progressives included, revel in complaining about our municipal transportation system. This group also enjoys accommodating people who oppose improving bus and rail service. A case in point: A single Geary Boulevard beauty-supply store owner has managed to delay an effort to build fast, efficient rapid transit bus service from the city's western suburbs to downtown, because he believes it would take away some parking spaces in front of his shop. Opposing change in San Francisco is a sacred progressive birthright.

Much of what San Franciscans call "progressivism" would be called wistful nostalgia in other cities.

Instead of "Remember the Alamo," this group says, "remember the Fillmore neighborhood" site of African-American-owned Victorian houses razed for redevelopment projects during the 1960s and '70s. Residual anger over that debacle now threatens a proposed redevelopment project along Market Street, the site of flophouses, derelict porn shops, and other marginal businesses. Countless meetings later, redevelopment has been endlessly delayed, and may be defeated, even though the project would add thousands of units of housing, while providing some $100 million in tax increment financing for subsidized housing.

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The subject of housing brings us back to the strange position Chris Daly occupies in the pantheon of San Francisco progressivism, which for more than a generation has meant opposing growth, while snubbing traditional liberal causes such as uplifting gays or African-Americans.

When San Franciscans, for example, were dying en masse from AIDS during the 1980s, progressives' minds were more preoccupied with opposing "Manhattanization," the term they coined for new office buildings. Today, when African-Americans in the Bayview District are losing their sons, nephews, friends, and neighbors to drug-related street violence, progressives' official political pamphlet is concerned primarily with enacting a moratorium on construction of market-rate apartments.

This makes Daly an odd progressive duck. Sure, he campaigned for public office as a vanguardista in the 1999 movement to stop construction of live-work lofts. But through his willingness to cut deals to allow new apartments in the district he represents, Daly's done more to permit housing construction — and thus promote the kind of vision elaborated by urban environmentalists such as Michael Bloomberg — than any San Francisco politician. This makes him a failure as an S.F. progressive.

If Daly wants to beat Newsom as he claims, he should toss the progressive moniker, and schedule a different convention of San Franciscans, ones who'd like to elect an effective mayor: Progressiveness be damned.