Sunday, 7.19.2020 The Throughline is your portal to tomorrow, a view of the Bay Area at the intersection of reality and possibility. Our nine-week journey continues by exploring how to engender equality:
SAN FRANCISCO AT A CROSSROADS — ALTERED BY PANDEMIC AND PROTEST
1 Universal income: A path to economic parity in Marin City
1 Bay Area’s young activists demand a better future
A SPECIAL REPORT BY CULTURE DESK WEEK TWO: CLOSING THE GAP
1 UCSF rethinks its civic role Find more inside.
J2 | Sunday, July 19, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
SFChronicle.com | Sunday, July 19, 2020 |
CLOSING THE GAP
OPTIMISM METER Cautious: Large-scale adoption of a Universal Basic Income has seemed wildly remote, but the idea is gaining momentum, and the pandemic has shown that cash payments are essential and effective.
ABOUT THIS SECTION Throughline is a Culture Desk limited-series project exploring what the Bay Area of the near future could look like after the effects of the pandemic and protests take hold. How could we use this moment to reshape our region for the better?
Photos: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle; map: Todd Trumbull / The Chronicle
In our final Throughline installment we want to showcase reader perspectives. So send us your questions or concerns, your stories and your big ideas for the future at culture@sfchronicle.com.
UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME: C O U L D I T R E A L LY CHANGE LIVES IN MARIN CITY?
CORRECTION
By Jason Fagone
On the cover: Check back each week as we reveal another portion of visual development artist Pong Lertsachanant’s rendering of the future of the Bay Area.
TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS
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Tenderloin, July 12, Page 8: In an article about the Tenderloin, Kasey Asberry’s name was misspelled.
S TA F F Throughline Editors Sarah Feldberg Robert Morast Designer Alex K. Fong Deputy Photo Director Russell Yip Creative Director Danielle Mollette-Parks Contributing Editor Bernadette Fay Managing Editor, Features Michael Gray
Although it did not stay that way for long, the Bay Area community of Marin City was created equal, designed from scratch almost 80 years ago by liberals and leftists who believed in racial diversity and by industrialists who needed cheap labor. During a frenzy of wartime construction in 1942, the U.S. government built a ship-making facility on the Sausalito waterfront. Then it carved out hundreds of acres to the northwest and raised houses there for the employees. This was Marin City. Within two years, the population swelled to 6,500, and 10% of residents were Black. ¶ Among them were the ancestors of Paul Austin, a 44-year-old Marin City nonprofit leader and youth sports coach.
Both of Austin’s grandfathers worked in the shipyard, he said. Most everyone at the facility earned the same income, and Black families in Marin City were able to save money and dream of growing wealth. One of his grandfathers, Roscoe, branched into home building and was able to build a house for his own family in Mill Valley, becoming one of the first Black homeowners in that city. The driveway was extremely steep, which confused Austin as a kid; he would watch in amazement as his grandmother confidently steered her big old Cadillac down the perilous slope. “It wasn’t
A Golden Opportunity
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LISTEN Reporter Jason Fagone discusses UBI and how it could change Marin City on The Chronicle’s Fifth & Mission podcast at sfchronicle.com/ podcasts.
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Imagine if everybody in America received a monthly paycheck from the government. That’s a UBI. The payment is “universal,” meaning it goes to rich and poor alike. It’s “basic,” providing a modest income floor; the figure often discussed by advocates is $1,000 per month, or $12,000 per year (the poverty line
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Top, from left: Scenes from Marin City, where public housing and public parks have decayed. A former baseball field is overgrown with tall grass but has lights for night games. Above: Paul Austin grew up in Marin City and now leads a nonprofit, Play Marin, that runs sports leagues and other classes for youth there. When Austin drives players to games in other parts of Marin County, the rec centers are new and roomy.
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for a U.S. adult is $12,760), though proposals range from $500 a month to a more generous $2,000. And, crucially, it’s paid in cash, so people can use it however they like, as opposed to a benefit like food stamps. Though philosophers as far back as Thomas Paine have promoted the idea, and Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1967 that a “guaranteed income” would abolish poverty and bring dignity “within reach of all,” the modern UBI movement took root in Europe during the 1970s, embraced as a way to expand the social safety net. Since then, tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang have pushed UBI as a tool for avoiding massive social unrest if robots one day eliminate millions of jobs. But in the last few years, activists and scholars have moved beyond the sciencefiction scenario, instead promoting UBI as a way of making America better and stronger and fairer right now — to blunt poverty, to increase racial and gender equity, to give workers in poor jobs more power, and to help people stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. And the Bay Area is at the forefront of the movement, a hotbed of research and experimentation. UBI isn’t just “a robot protection racket,” said the Oakland-based writer Annie Lowrey, who covers economic policy for the Atlantic and wrote the book “Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World.” While cautioning that UBI is far from a magic bullet to solve every problem, she describes it as a powerful principle that could spark “real changes” in families, workplaces and cities. “There’s a very basic humanitarian spirit behind it,” said Juliana Bidadanure, a philosopher at Stanford who directs the university’s Basic Income Lab. “A decent society is one where we do not let people fall too low.” The case for a Universal Basic Income begins with acknowledging that America is a brutal country in many ways, though it doesn’t have to be, as Lowrey stresses in her book. (“Poverty in the United States is a choice. … Racism is a choice. The patriarchy is a choice.”) About 40 million Americans live in poverty, and the rate of child poverty, 16%, is significantly higher than in other developed countries like Sweden and the Netherlands. Health care in the U.S. is vastly more expensive. Traditional government benefit programs are hard to use and costly to run. And even though so many Americans are struggling, there’s a broad stigma against
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people who receive government benefits. “There is still this idea that because you’re on welfare, you’re deficient,” Bidadanure said. “It’s almost at the cost of your dignity.” It gets worse: Brutal policies turn out to be expensive. For instance, the Georgetown economist Harry Holzer found that child poverty costs America $700 billion a year in lost productivity, higher crime and higher health care expenditures; other estimates top $1 trillion. If dysfunction costs money, fixing it could ultimately save money, even if you have to spend on the front end to do it. Lowrey estimates in her book that a national UBI program would cost from $1 trillion to $4 trillion per year, depending on how it is configured. So far, UBI has been tested in a handful of places in America and around the world. One of the largest U.S. pilot projects is in the Central Valley city of Stockton, where the administration of Mayor Michael Tubbs, the city’s first Black mayor, raised money from philanthropists and has distributed $500 a month to 125 residents since February 2019. A 45-year-old single mother replaced her car that was destroyed in an accident and paid bills that had been keeping her awake at night; a 68-year-old woman who lost her job at the Oracle Arena reduced her credit-card debt and bought her son a pair of jeans for his birthday. Tubbs has since leveraged the results to sell other mayors on the virtues of a UBI, and leaders in 12 other cities — including Los Angeles, Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Newark, N.J. — have announced pilots of their own. Beyond just helping people pay bills, cash payments could start to chip away at bigger barriers that stop many American families from getting ahead, advocates say. Feminist thinkers have pointed out that UBI would compensate women for work that is crucial but too often unpaid, like child care. It may boost people stuck in low-wage jobs, too, allowing them to press for more pay and better conditions. A UBI could also be a leveling force for many people of color, said Steven McKie and Gabriela Canales, a couple in their twenties who live in the Mission District. McKie, a cryptocurrency expert and investor, is one of the few Black venture capitalists in the region, leading his own fund called Amentum Capital, and Canales, a doctoral student studying cell biology at UC San Francisco, comes from a Mexican American family. McKie grew up poor in South Income continues on J9
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until I got older when she really explained it to me,” Austin recalled: It turned out that Roscoe had sloped the driveway to conceal the house during construction so that white residents wouldn’t realize a Black family was moving in and try to prevent them from buying lumber. Austin grew up in Marin City, on a hill with a glimpse of Richardson Bay, and over the decades he has watched the view from his hometown change in disturbing ways. Federal agencies and the private sector “redlined” Marin City, depressing home values there and requiring that homes in
surrounding areas be sold to whites only; the ship building industry collapsed, its high-paying jobs replaced with low-wage retail; county officials allowed the city’s public housing and parks to decay. And while tech-industry wealth flooded into much of Marin County, sprouting mansions and organic grocery stores, the poverty rate in Marin City has reached 25%, compared with 5% for Sausalito, its neighbor to the southeast, and 5% for Mill Valley, to the northwest. On a county map published by the Marin Convention & Visitors Bureau, Marin City does not even appear. Three years ago, wanting to help kids in Marin City, Austin founded a nonprofit called Play Marin and started running youth sports leagues at the same recreational center where he used to play basketball as a kid — a low, red-brown building decorated with murals of civil-rights icons and circled by scraggly grass. Immediately he ran into a problem: The basketball court was too small to host home games. The 3-point line was right next to the sideline; you couldn’t really shoot a proper 3. But when Austin drove his players to games in other Marin County locales, the rec centers were invariably new and roomy, the courts fresh. “I’m just tired of Marin City going without,” Austin said on a recent weekday afternoon at the rec center. “We deserve a lot more.” Aside from a national program of reparations for slavery, it’s hard to imagine any single law or policy change that could quickly bring the sort of major public investment and infrastructure that Marin City needs — especially right now, in a country immobilized by a viral pandemic. But there is an idea out there that might help. Something unexpected and different. Something that could fly above the weird and baffling rubble of America right now to deliver some measure of relief to millions. And it may end up having the biggest impact in the places that are the most disempowered — places like Marin City. It’s called a Universal Basic Income. The idea, more or less, is to give people cash.
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SFChronicle.com | Sunday, July 19, 2020 |
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‘JUST STOP KILLING US’: YOUTH PROTEST L EADERS ON THE F UTURE THEY’RE M ARCHING FOR Story by Sarah Feldberg | Photos by Sarahbeth Maney
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OPTIMISM METER Hopeful: These students are engaged, thoughtful and determined. If they’re a glimpse of the Bay Area’s future, tomorrow looks bright.
TIANA DAY Age: 17 Hometown: San Ramon School: Graduated Dougherty Valley High School Protest: Led the march across the Golden Gate Bridge on June 6 that drew thousands
ON GROWING UP BLACK Being one of the only people of color in my area and one of the only families (of color), I know how much discrimination my family faces just for being in a nice area. They don’t expect us to be living in a house in San Ramon and going to these schools that I do. I’ve talked to so many Black kids over the past few weeks, hearing their experiences. We all have the moment where we realize, OK, maybe being Black isn’t a great thing or maybe being myself isn’t a good thing, because people see me differently.
ON CHANGING EDUCATION I’m really passionate about making sure that things are getting into the curriculum. There’s so much history that people don’t know. Twelve years of me being in school, we learn about slavery and Martin Luther King Jr., and that’s the civil rights movement. But there’s so much more history, and there’s history that’s being created every day. I took a social justice class my senior year and it changed my perspective on the world. We should be learning about social justice issues all throughout school. When we’re learning about the California missions we should be learning the full story. Don’t just do the skewed American version.
XAVIER BROWN Age: 19 Hometown: Oakland School: Rising sophomore at UCLA Protest: Organized the protest from Oakland Technical High School with Akil Riley on June 1 that drew 15,000 people
ON THE CHANGE HE WANTS TO SEE I want to see more money go into these Black neighborhoods. That means groceries, after-school programs, recreational programs, schooling, affordable housing where they actually own the house, job programs. I want to see the police force reformed in such a drastic way that it’s not really even a police force anymore. Change can come, but we have to push forward full force. We’ve been doing really well, and we have to keep going. It has to be done.
When protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police reached the Bay Area, many of the people leading the marches were students. Local high school and college students have been at the helm of the region’s largest demonstrations, speaking before an estimated 15,000 protesters at Oakland Technical High School, leading throngs across the Golden Gate Bridge and walking miles to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s house to demand she defund the Oakland Police Department. ¶ As the Throughline tries to peer into the hazy future of the Bay Area, we realized one element was already clearly in view: These young people are the future. Here’s what they have to say about why they marched, the changes they want to see and why they’re going to be the last generation to fight police brutality. DWAYNE DAVIS Age: 17 Hometown: Oakland/San Ramon School: Graduated from McClymonds High School; starting Cal State Los Angeles in the fall Protest: Organized the march to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s house with Jessica Ramos on June 10
ON WHY HE MARCHED Every single time there’s a police brutality case, it’s seen in the public eye for a little bit, then it gets turned into a hashtag for about a week and then it’s gone. It’s not forgotten, but it’s still gone. It sucks seeing a video of someone that could very well be me. It was just so horrific because it was so long. It’s very scary, becase I know that if I was in that situation, if you try to resist and tell them, “Can you please get off of me, you’re really hurting me,” they would probably use even more force. But even if you stay still, there’s no guarantee that you will live. And that’s exactly what happened: George Floyd stayed still and he still died. That’s one of the main reasons I was like, “I have to take action.”
ON TAKING THE PROTEST TO THE MAYOR’S DOORSTEP We heard about the protesters that went up to the mayor of L.A. Eric Garcetti’s house. I had been telling Jessica (Ramos), “We’ve gotten the attention of everyone worldwide with these protests happening nationally, internationally. What is the next step? What do we do from here? We gotta change laws. We gotta change policies. Who is the one person that can do that for us if they listen to what we’re saying? It’s the mayor.” California, we’re trendsetters. We always do things first, and then whatever we do the rest of the country will follow. So I think hearing us out and being willing to do something to set a trend again would be amazing. What better thing to do than defund the Oakland Police? It can start here and become a revolution. It can be something the mayor will always be known for. ON FUNDING I’ve heard hospitals complaining about not having enough masks, not having enough supplies during the pandemic. I’ve seen students beg for more textbooks and teachers beg for more reading books, and low-income families beg for more support with health or food. But I’ve never seen police officers beg for any resources. I’d love to see that money go back to the community. Mental health services, physical health, education, low-income housing — there’s so much you can do with money that’s being spent for the Oakland Police Department.
AKIL RILEY
Age: 19 Hometown: Oakland School: Rising sophomore at Howard University Protest: Organized the protest from Oakland Technical High School with Xavier Brown on June 1 that drew 15,000 people
JESSICA RAMOS Age: 17 Hometown: Oakland School: Rising senior at Skyline High School Protest: Organized the march to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s house with Dwayne Davis on June 10 ON POLICE VIOLENCE (When I heard about George Floyd) I just felt like “not again.” My first one was Oscar Grant. I was only 5 or 6. I remember the day, Jan. 1. We were going to go to San Francisco on Jan. 2 for my dad’s birthday, and when we take BART we go to Fruitvale Station. I remember seeing hella candles and everything. I didn’t understand, of course. I was like, “Oh, somebody died.” But during the years we see more and more deaths, and it just shows the inequity and the injustice that has been happening. We shouldn’t even be fighting for this. If this is not solved by this year or next year or there’s no reform and no changes, my kids are going to be protesting for the same things, and there are going to be more lives lost. ON HER FUTURE My dream college is Stanford. I want to study education policy. My dream is to become a teacher and make education reforms and make education policy after teaching. I want to be able to teach students that look like me, that come from the community like me and give them opportunities that my teachers gave me.
ON WHY HE PROTESTED It really just came from a place of pain. My whole life has influenced me, growing up how I did being a Black man in America. But also seeing all those videos of George Floyd and police killings. How does that not do something to you? How does that not make you sad or angry at the system? I want to be in a community and a country where we value people over profits ... where people have adequate housing, human rights, access to food, access to water. And just stop killing us. OPD has been under federal oversight for so many years. I think we need to start from scratch. We need to stop patching the holes of a ship that’s sinking and start a new ship.
ONLINE For more photos and quotes and for clips from The Chronicle’s Zoom chat with these youth leaders of recent protests, go to sfchronicle.com/ throughline.
ON CREATING MOMENTUM (The youth) are just sick and tired. We have the energy to do it. We’re passionate and unapologetic and fearless too. We’re already starting to see change. It’s a snowball effect. We just helped to push that snowball down the hill. Things happen for years at a time. It’s definitely for the long run. I think we contributed to that and helped start some movememt.
Sarah Feldberg is an editor of the Throughline. Email: sarah.feldberg@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sarahfeldberg
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O PT I M I S M M E T E R Neutral: The pandemic has made people more aware of workers in overlooked jobs, but longterm wage and benefit gains are still elusive.
Photos by Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle
W H AT I S ENOUGH?: H OW W E HONOR OUR ESSENTIAL WO R K E RS
Certain jobs come with certain risks. A firefighter, for instance, might expect that one day she’ll have to run into a burning building. But before the novel coronavirus began to spread in China, before it had claimed more than half a million lives worldwide, I doubt most people thought they might serve on the front lines of a pandemic. Definitely not those with some of our lowest-paid and mostignored jobs. There have been many attempts to crunch the numbers and find out who, exactly, we’re talking about when we talk about essential workers. The percentages vary, but the baseline is always the same. Women are more likely than men to be essential workers — and people of color make up far more of the essential workforce than they do the workforce as a whole. It’s no surprise, then, that these workers “of the utmost importance” tend to make less money, too. In California, according to a study by Business.org, essential workers make 14% less than the average worker. Nationwide the disparity is closer to 18%. Now, not only do essential workers make the least, they’re also asked to risk the most. Infections have ripped through meatpacking plants, garment factories, homeless shelters, grocery stores — and, as a result, communities of color, too. The Mission’s Latino community was one of the hardest-hit in San Francisco, very likely, in part, because Latinos hold a disproportionate percentage of serviceworker (and therefore essential-worker) jobs. (Latinos are also more likely to live in multigenerational housing.)
By Ryan Kost
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Search inquiries for the word “essential” began to trend on Google the week of March 8. Seven days later they hit their peak. Same for phrases like “essential work” and “essential worker.” Then the inquiries dropped just as fast as they rose. The trend lines look something like a sharp mountain surrounded by plains. Something like this: ____/\____ ¶ This was the same time the Bay Area and (shortly after) the state of California issued the nation’s first stay-at-home orders — March 16 and March 20, respectively — and told residents to shelter in place while making an exception for “essential” work. Doctors and nurses couldn’t stay at home in the midst of a pandemic. That seemed clear. But neither could grocery store cashiers or farmworkers or food processors or social workers — and on and on the list went. ¶ Their work, which doesn’t get noticed much, was suddenly essential. Or, as Merriam-Webster might put it: “of the utmost importance.” ¶ This was, for me (and I imagine millions of others), a surreal moment. ¶ Immediately, I thought of my mom and all the years she spent checking groceries so that we could afford our own.
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YOUR ESSENTIAL VIEWS How have your views of essential workers changed during the pandemic? Tell us your story by emailing to culture@ sfchronicle.com
My mom’s first job was at the grocery store her father managed. This was a position held proudly, a sort of proof the American Dream was real. He’d started as the son of farmer immigrants, tending fields of sugar beets — white roots made tan by the dirt they grow in — that look a bit like fat carrots. Over the years, my mom would work her way up to a management position, too. But after my parents divorced, she went back to checking. There was more flexibility in it for a single mother of two. So, when I was young — young enough that I still needed help packing my lunch and getting to school — my mom would slice apples and cut crusts and walk me to the bus stop. Usually, she’d wait there until I’d found a seat, the doors had closed and I was far enough away that I couldn’t see her anymore. Then, she’d walk home, probably fix another cup of coffee, set curls in her hair, make her eyelashes thick with mascara and head to work at the supermarket. She’d spend all day on her feet, sliding items over the scanner and bagging groceries if there wasn’t a bagger to help. I remember asking her how she could type so quickly on an adding machine. Her fingers were so, so fast. She hardly
“Essential workers are human,” Sidney says. “Hopefully now (this moment) has opened up everybody’s mind. This is a real job like any job.” Muni gave Shaun Reeves the option to stay home when all this began and bus routes were cut throughout the city. He thought about taking the transit agency up on the offer. Then he thought about all the other essential workers. “How are they going to get to work? ... We’re the veins of the city.” Wasn’t long before he volunteered to drive a special bus route for those potentially sick with COVID-19. He’d dress up in a white, paper-thin bunny suit and pull on his N-95 mask. Sheets of not-quite-clear plastic separated him from his passengers. “That’s when it really hit me,” he says. “That’s when I really felt like I was doing something.” If people want to honor his work, Reeves says, they can just be kind when they catch a ride on his bus. Last week, three people said “thank-you” as he cut south through Market Street on the No. 9 route. He seemed surprised. “I guess this is a pretty good day today,” he said. “Got people thanking me. Traffic was good.”
paid attention, almost never made a mistake. “I do this all day,” she said.
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For a while, from March to May or maybe even June, people all around the Bay Area (and the country) clapped as the sun set and shouted out their living room windows in honor of essential workers. Together, we called them “brave” and offered our sincere and abashed thanks. San Francisco Mayor London Breed dedicated a week in June to their labor, while Whole Foods gave employees T-shirts that read “hero” on the front and “hardcore” on the back. Some companies issued hazard pay, an extra dollar or two an hour, to their employees. But those extras are already drying up at drugstores and supermarkets and Amazon dot com. (Though, to be fair, Amazon followed up with a $500 bonus.) So, forget the money and the cheering. What might be enough? Enough might include a livable wage. San Francisco’s minimum wage is higher than most at $16.07 an hour. That still falls short of the $20.82 an hour suggested for San Francisco by the Living Wage Calculator. (That’s just for one person without a child; a single mother of two would need $46.74 an hour.) Nationwide, the minimum wage — $7.25 an hour — hasn’t changed in more than a decade. That means, a full-time minimum-wage worker cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95% of U.S. counties, according to a recent report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington D.C. Enough might include a national program of robust health care and paid time off. For the farmworkers tending the fields at Del Bosque Farm — a farm about two hours southeast of San Francisco in Firebaugh (Fresno County) that specializes in melons — enough might include a path toward legal status. “If they’re essential, they should have legal status in this country,” Joe Del Bosque, the farm’s owner, told me one warm morning. “They’re not asking for the moon.” He kept on: “For a while, they were being called heroes. Now I think they’re forgotten again. But they’re still here.” Sometimes “enough” is harder to define. For the past couple months I’ve spent hours talking to people whose jobs were suddenly deemed essential. I’ve watched as they’ve worked and moved through their days. I’ve asked each of them what it might look like to honor their work even as the applause and the thanks fade away. “We joke ‘Oh now we’re important,’ ” says Tonya Allen, the operations manager for a family homeless shelter in the Tenderloin. “We have more essential workers than we thought we did.” Her shelter, on Golden Gate Avenue, has had only one case of the coronavirus
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Opposite page: Muni bus driver Shaun Reeves can be seen behind a reflection on his bus window. He volunteered to drive a special bus route for people potentially sick with COVID-19. From top: Essential worker Noreen Dosayla checks out a customer at Canyon Market in S.F.; Tonya Allen (center) leads a meeting at Hamilton Families, a shelter for unhoused families in the Tenderloin; Marbella Garcia stocks inventory at Canyon Market in S.F.
“We joke ‘Oh now we’re important.’ We have more essential workers than we thought we did.” TO N YA A L L E N , operations manager for a family homeless shelter in the Tenderloin
in 4½ months. When she found out that she had been exposed to the virus, she could have been afraid or mad or resentful. All three might have made sense; she’s a cancer patient on the tail end of treatment. Mostly, though, she was annoyed — annoyed to be at home. She wanted to be at work. Her job is important, she says. She takes care of the most vulnerable the same way doctors take care of the sick. If people saw her and her work and the people she helps in that light, that would make all the difference. Briana Sidney is a worker/owner at Mandela Grocery Cooperative in Oakland. She remembers the first day of the shelter-in-place order because she stayed a few more hours to help after a long line had formed outside the market and wound up with a parking ticket. She’s been called “brave” a lot since then. So many earnest thank-yous, too. Now, she says, she just hopes people won’t forget that they once saw the value in her work.
I never talked much to my friends about what my mom did to keep my brother and me housed and fed. Their parents were lawyers and pilots and commodity traders. (I didn’t know what the last one meant exactly, but I knew it meant money.) It’s not that I was embarrassed by my mom’s work. I knew it was hard work. I knew that she found joy in her work. There’s still a hazy sketch of a memory from when she switched departments and started splitting her time between the cash register and product display. She’d come home and tell me what she’d done to an endcap (the display at the end of an aisle) to make it pop. Still, I had a distinct awareness (even then) that most people didn’t think much of the work she did, if they even stopped to notice at all. Last week, I woke up early to watch a long string of big trucks pull up to Canyon Market and drop off plastic-wrapped pallets full of every kind of grocery — soda water and chips and sausage and yogurt and milk and bright orange fish fillets. I watched as workers sorted and shelved it all, bringing the store back to life after a weekend of being picked over and left bare. And then I watched the women (only women) at the cash registers scan and bag groceries, then wipe everything down with disinfectant. Again, I thought about my mom. I was never embarrassed by what my mom did. I just knew she deserved better. I knew she deserved to have her work valued.
Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @RyanKost
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H E A LT H I N E Q U I T Y: GUIDING UCSF TO A B R OA D E R CIVIC ROLE By Ananya Panchal
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When the coronavirus pandemic first hit the United States, it was known as the virus that doesn’t discriminate. Among the early people infected were rich and poor, young and old, NBA players and nursing-home residents. ¶ “In conversations, COVID-19 was known as ‘the great equalizer’ among infections because anyone could get it,” said Howard Pinderhughes, director of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF. “That narrative was not correct for a number of reasons.”
Today, the reality is more clear: The coronavirus has taken a disproportionate toll on communities of color. In San Francisco, Latino individuals make up 15% of the population but account for 50% of coronavirus cases. Black residents represent 10% of the city’s COVID-19 deaths, despite making up less than 6% of its population. Pinderhughes has a vision for erasing the health disparities that have come into harsh focus during the pandemic. He is leading an initiative to establish UCSF as an anchor institution that would support and strengthen some of the most underserved communities in the city. “This is a moment where we have been faced with the realities of COVID-19 and its impact on — and as a result of — health inequity in San Francisco,” he said. “Simultaneously, we are
Anastasiia Sapon / UCSF
Howard Pinderhughes, director of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF, sees the potential for the university to boost under-resourced San Francisco neighborhoods through targeted hiring and investment.
“This is a moment where we have been faced with the realities of COVID-19 and its impact on — and as a result of — health inequity in San Francisco.” HOWARD PINDERHUGHES, director of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF
looking at the issue of institutional and structural racism and violence in a more profound way than we have in a long time.” Right now, Pinderhughes said, is a once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity for social change. “It’s easy to say, ‘We need change.’ It’s much more difficult to do it.” But he has a plan to make it happen. Anchor institutions are part of a growing global movement in which large institutions, like universities and hospitals, leverage their power and funding to promote health equity and equality. In order to “move the needle” on the social determinants of health — like economic stability, environment, education, food, health care and community — anchor institutions redirect their hiring and investing practices to local residents and local business. Improving and funding local education and public housing are also a priority. Years ago, long before the pandemic and recent protests, Pinderhughes recognized the tremendous potential that UCSF had to structurally minimize — and someday eradicate — the health disparities that exist in vulnerable and predominantly Black and Latino communities like Bayview-Hunters Point and the Mission District. “I started promoting it to basically anyone at UCSF who would listen.” UCSF is the second-largest employer in San Francisco, and with some restructuring of its hiring practices, Pinderhughes said, the university could create wealth-generating opportunities in the communities it serves. He would like to see sustainable jobs created so that lower income people don’t have to leave the city for more affordable places like Antioch, Fresno and Stockton. Pinderhughes grew up in Roxbury, a predominantly Black and under-resourced neighborhood of Boston that was plagued by violence in the 1990s. “My childhood experiences piqued my perspectives on race, race relations as well as my understanding of structural inequities, racism and violence,” he said. He was introduced to the concept of an anchor institution by his wife, Raquel Pinderhughes, about nine years ago. She worked with the Cleveland Clinic, one of the first and most wellknown anchor institutions. Raquel Pinderhughes also played a huge role in drafting the The UCSF Anchor Institution Report, a document that analyzes and assesses the viability of the university to function as an anchor institute for its community. The report was funded by the San Francisco Foundation, a grantmaking public charity, and the office of the UCSF Chancellor, both of whom — along with the SF Center for Community Development — have expressed support for the initiative. “This is happening now,” said Dr. Kevin Grumbach, a professor and chair of the UCSF Department of Family Community Medicine. “The chancellor has committed to making this a priority.” The report also recommends increasing UCSF’s capacity to hire, train and promote low-income residents from impoverished neighborhoods of San Francisco. The university has an abundance of entry-level positions that workforce development pipeline programs can help fill, and by partnering with local school districts and universities, it could help develop the skills needed for those jobs. In 2016-17, UCSF spent more than $1.1 billion on goods and services, but the majority of that money went to large companies. San Francisco businesses received $116 million, half of which flowed to companies within the Financial District, downtown, Chinatown, Potrero Hill and South of Market neighborhoods. Less than 4% of the total spending went to businesses categorized as “diverse,” including woman- or LGBTQ-owned. Redirecting the university’s money could increase wealth in under-resourced areas and ease the health disparities that have been highlighted by the coronavirus. Grumbach said something as simple as buying lunch for conferences from local businesses could make a noticeable impact. By structurally improving the health and well-being of a community from the ground up, UCSF could increase the resilience of people to be able to deal with both a pandemic and everyday medical issues. In 2013, there was an 11-year difference in life expectancy between San Francisco’s Mission District (73.5 years) and the nearby Noe Valley neighborhood (84.5 years). According to the anchor initiative report, the rate of preventable emergency room visits for Bayview-Hunters Point is more than four times that of the Marina. The Mission and Bayview-Hunters Point have much higher populations of color. If UCSF were a successful anchor institution, Pinderhughes said, life expectancy gaps would likely close over time. He said the city would also have noticeably lower rates of coronavirus infection, and the gaps in mortality between Black and brown communities and their white counterparts, wouldn’t be so stark. But UCSF can’t do it alone. Pinderhughes said his ultimate goal is to make changes within Bay Area corporate culture, so that companies understand they have a responsibility to provide the “pipeline” to employment. Though, if health equity doesn’t see drastic improvements soon, Pinderhuges fears the worst may happen. “If we do nothing, over the next 30 years we won’t have to worry about it anymore, because there won’t be poor and people of color left in the city.” Ananya Panchal is a Chronicle staff writer. Email: Ananya.panchal@sfchronicle.com
Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle
Courtesy Sausalito Historical Society
Paul Austin, above left, at the Marin City Recreation Center, which sports a mural depicting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1942, above right, a ship-making facility bustled on the Sausalito waterfront, followed by acres of housing, which became Marin City.
Income from page J3
Carolina and Virginia, he said, and when he first arrived in the Bay Area, he struggled just to afford groceries while people with family wealth seemed to sail forward. And Canales says that while half of her graduate student stipend is eaten up by rent, she is better off than many fellow students who have large tuition debt. “They’re unable to catch up unless miraculous circumstances happen,” Canales said, likening it to playing the board game Monopoly with a handicap. “Take one player and don’t give them any money in the beginning. See if they can catch up with anybody.” A UBI would simply take Monopoly’s familiar principle — everyone starts out with some money — and apply it to the real world. The policy, they said, could boost diversity in the tech industry and at institutions like UCSF, giving people from underrepresented groups a little more flexibility and breathing room. You could “fail and fall on your feet and have a safety net,” McKie said. And when the world throws something unexpected at you, like a deadly virus that smashes the economy, you might really need that money, he said, advancing an argument for UBI that has gained force in the era of COVID-19: A basic income makes people and societies more resilient. There’s new evidence for this: A pair of studies recently found that an expansion in federal aid during the pandemic, in the form of weekly unemployment bonuses and one-time stimulus payments, has stopped the national poverty rate from rising. Of course, the Bay Area’s high cost of living also raises questions about the effectiveness of a basic income here: Is $1,000 a month per adult really enough to change people’s lives in a place where median rents are among the highest in the country ($3,300 a month for a one-bedroom place in San Francisco)? Manu Saadia, a Los Angeles writer and the author of “Trekonomics: The Economics of ‘Star Trek,’ ” said that many uppermiddle-class and rich people would probably just stash their basic-income payments in an investment account. But those with less wealth would be forced to spend their cash payments. In the absence of other fixes to the social safety net, a UBI could “drive inequality even further,” Saadia said. “What good is it if there’s no housing supply? What good is it if there’s no universal health insurance?” This is where the debate over cash payments becomes more speculative. Most pilot projects are small, testing the waters a few hundred people at a time. “We don’t have something that’s been implemented at scale and to a large number of people,” said Rebecca Hasdell, a postdoctoral research fellow with Stanford’s Basic Income Lab. While other kinds of benefit programs have provided clues about how a UBI could transform a community, Hasdell and her colleagues say they dream of gathering data on the scale of a city and asking bigger questions: Once people on the margins have cash to pay for basic needs, what changes? Does infrastructure look different? Do people relate to each other differently? So ... what would happen? Take Marin City (3,000 people) and Sausalito (7,000) as an example: How would these cities change if every adult got $1,000 a month, no questions asked?
***
In front of the Marin City rec center on July 1, Paul Austin met a reporter to go for a drive through Marin City. Hopping into a black van, he lifted a megaphone off the passenger seat. “That’s for protests,” he said. After the police killing of George Floyd, Austin and three young women activists — Ayana MorganWoodard, Lynnette Egenlauf and Mikyla Williams — organized a Black Lives Matter protest, drawing at least 1,000 peaceful demonstrators to Marin City on June 2. A day before, the police chief of nearby Tiburon warned of possible violence at the event and told county residents to avoid it; he later apologized, saying he did not intend to “contribute to a negative narrative” about Marin City. At the rally, one speaker was Sekyiwa Shakur, the sister of rapper Tupac Shakur, who grew up in Marin City and graduated from Tamalpais High School a few years before Austin did. Austin also spoke, delivering a history lesson on his hometown: “It’s been too long that Marin County has kept its knee on Marin City’s neck.” Now he piloted the van through the city, stopping at the sites of various civic bruises. Behind a public K-8 school, Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, he pointed out a baseball field in disrepair, overgrown with tall grass and wildflowers but featuring lights for night games. Back on the road, a half mile away, he drove through Golden Gate Village, a public housing project where 80% of the kids in his rec league live; past that, he turned into a grim, half-empty shopping center with a vacant Outback Steakhouse, some retail stores and a Target, which serves as the only grocery store in Marin City. Exiting the shopping center, he swung south, and the van climbed
“You shouldn’t be living check to check. You see bills that turn pink. You get used to seeing the lights get turned off. It becomes your norm because that’s what you grew up in.” PAUL AUSTI N
MARIN CITY IN NUMBERS ECONOMICS
22% below poverty level. It’s 14% statewide.
43k median income. In California, it is about $71,000. RACE
29% White.
29% Hispanic or Latino (of any race).
25% Black or African American.
8% Asian. Source: United States Census Bureau
a steep hill overlooking the bay, into an area that he and his neighbors used to call the Marin City Headlands. The street was lined with townhomes on either side. This was still Marin City, but signs said “North Sausalito.” “That’s the new wording now,” Austin said, laughing — a house in “North Sausalito” sells for more than one in “Marin City.” Further south lay Sausalito proper, where even bigger homes mingled with older, working-class housing. He circled back through his old Marin City neighborhood, pointing out the homes of Black families he grew up with. Despite a wave of gentrification, he said, many families are still here, hanging on to what they have. He also drove past his own home in Marin City, where he lives with his wife, a public-school principal, and their two young children. They bought it four years ago, further committing themselves to the city and its future. All in all, the drive revealed a microcosm of the Bay Area: New money, old families, deep divisions. How would a Universal Basic Income land here? A thousand dollars for each adult in Marin City and Sausalito, and two thousand for each couple? “$2,000 a month, on top of what they’re earning?” Austin asked. Yes, on top. “$24,000 a year, for you and your wife?” He exhaled. You set it aside for your kids, he said. To help them get ahead a little bit. That was his first thought, but then others flowed. Full-time teachers, he said, would certainly appreciate the money — many struggle to pay Bay Area rent on their low salaries — and so would women who work as “paraprofessional” school aides and keep the schools running. And what about people who cook and sell food on the side? $2,000 a month could be their seed money to start a local eatery — maybe one in the barren shopping center. He also envisioned the impact of cash payments on working families. “You shouldn’t be living check to check,” he said. “You see bills that turn pink. You get used to seeing the lights get turned off. It becomes your norm because that’s what you grew up in.” But that kind of stress isn’t normal in wealthier places. Some of the best evidence about the impact of cash payments on a community comes from a 1970s experiment in Canada. The government offered a guaranteed income to all 12,500 residents of a rural town called Dauphin, and although political disagreements stopped the program prematurely, the economist Evelyn Forget later re-discovered and mined the data. She found that the money helped more kids complete high school, allowed working mothers to take time off at the births of their children and made people healthier (visits to doctors and mental-health providers decreased). And the primary earners in Dauphin continued to work about the same amount as before. So if a basic income program proved effective in Marin City, you wouldn’t only see less homelessness and poverty, fewer evictions and more students graduating from high school. You’d also see the difference written across people’s bodies: After 50 years, residents on average may literally be taller, since malnutrition stunts growth, and may have longer life spans too. There’s even a chance that the cash payments would change perceptions of Marin City in wealthier parts of the county. This seemed to happen in the Canadian town of Dauphin during the 1970s, according to Bidadanure and Hasdell: People stopped looking at government assistance through a moral lens. It suddenly got harder to judge those who received money because everyone was receiving it. In Marin City, Austin stopped the van at George “Rocky” Graham Park, a point of community pride. First built in the 1940s, the park had sunk into neglect, but in 2015, the Marin City Community Services District, where Austin worked at the time, led an effort to revive it, transforming the space with new playground equipment, turf and an amphitheater. They named the park after a Marin City sports coach and activist who was killed in a dispute in 1978. Next to a slide, a boy was watching his younger sister play. Austin recognized him and said hello; the boy waved. The boy was an incoming junior at Tamalpais High School, Austin said, and he was stuck providing child care for his own sibling. Austin knows a lot of bright kids in that position, he said — they aren’t free to take summer jobs that create opportunities. With a basic income, their parents could afford some day care. This is the thing about a UBI: It’s not magic. It won’t fix everything. But it’s a start. It’s simple. It’s freeing. It could let in some surprising kinds of light. And right now, we need that. “You know, there’s so many people in distress,” Austin said. He shook his head and squinted as the wind picked up in the park. Thinking about UBI had his mind going in all kinds of directions. “I mean, this could be so,” he said. “Just imagine.”
Jason Fagone is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jason.fagone@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfagone
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J10 | Sunday, July 19, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
CLOSING THE GAP
O N L I N E O N LY Watch Tongo Eisen-Martin perform his poem “The Course of Meal” at sfchronicle.com/throughline.
INQUIRY IN VERSE: AC T I V I ST- P O E T O N P O L I T I C S & P R OT E ST By Sarah Feldberg
M
Jessica Christian / The Chronicle
Michael Brown. Freddie Gray. Now George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks. Whenever a police killing of a Black person reaches a certain peak in the national consciousness, people find Tongo Eisen-Martin. Eisen-Martin is an organizer, educator and poet, the product of a “revolutionary upbringing” in a family of organizers in San Francisco, where critical thinking and questions were part of the daily conversation and “there was no such thing as a child’s place.” Today, his work is still about questioning. He has taught at detention facilities like Rikers Island in New York and San Quentin, and his poems interrogate topics such as white supremacy and capitalism in rhythmic stanzas, at once “urgent protests and jazz-like puzzles,” as Chronicle contributor Brandon Yu wrote of Eisen-Martin’s book “Heaven Is all Goodbyes.” The book won a 2018 California Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Eisen-Martin is also the author of “We Charge Genocide Again!” a curriculum first published in 2012 about the extrajudicial killing of Black people in the United States based on a report by his mother,
Arlene Eisen. Interest in the course waxes and wanes with public attention to police violence. Right now, it’s high. Since the death of George Floyd on May 25, Eisen-Martin has been facilitating political-education workshops over Zoom, leading 40 or 50 attendees at a time to analyze the white power structure in the U.S. and to respond to writing prompts that ask what the United States means to a white officer and the Black man he has gripped in a vicious headlock. “What has to be going through a police officer’s mind to perform the function of the state? You go through their mind to reveal bigger ideological realities of extrajudicial killings,” Eisen-Martin says. “They might kill us like we’re not human, but in that process, they’ve actually lost their humanity.” Eisen-Martin has been watching the protests play out around the Bay Area and beyond, seeing people march who’ve never pro-
“THE COURSE OF MEAL” BY TONGO EISEN-MARTIN Apparently, too much of San Francisco was not there in the first place This dream requires more condemned Africans or State violence rises down or Still life is just getting warmed up or army life is looking for a new church and ignored all other suggestions or folk tale writers have not made up their minds as to who is going to be their friends “this is the worst downtown yet. And I’ve borrowed a cigarette everywhere … I’ve taken many walks to the back of buses…that led on out the back of a story teller’s prison sentence … then on out the back of slave scars.” “this is my comeback face. Though I know you can’t tell …”
Tongo Eisen-Martin, a poet, activist and educator who grew up in S.F., stands in front of a mural painted by his godmother, Miranda Bergman, in Balmy Alley in the Mission District.
tested before and watching experienced organizers grow more militant in their demands. “Last time, once the police got indicted everyone went home,” he says. “Before, the call was ‘Jail killer cops.’ Now the call is ‘Abolish the police,’ or at least ‘Defund the police.’ ” The coronavirus pandemic is a new ingredient helping brew the energy in the streets. Normally, Eisen-Martin says, people are too exhausted to feel like they can upend the status quo. “With Mike Brown and Baltimore, people still had to go to work.” Eisen-Martin also trains his writer’s gaze on San Francisco. His hometown is by turns his muse and menace; its fault lines and features woven into his psyche. “I don’t have this incarnation of myself if I’m not born and raised in San Francisco,” he says. We asked Eisen-Martin for a poem for the Throughline, and he sent us “The Course of Meal” below. Written in public spaces around San Francisco before the pandemic cleared the streets and
the protests filled them again, it is his “original interpretation of gentrification, understanding it to be as much as military reality as a socioeconomic one.” As he talks about the poem and city that gave rise to it, he speaks about gang injunctions that “declared it illegal to be you” on your block and about Black and brown communities that never stood a chance against wealthy residents trying to “playground up” San Francisco. He talks about a future where the divisions only grow more stark, where even the gentrifiers are gentrified, left mourning their cocktail bars and beer gardens. And then he circles back to the death of a Black man at the hands of police officers — Mario Woods, who was shot and killed in the Bayview neighborhood by San Francisco Police in 2015. Only a mass movement, EisenMartin says, will carry San Francisco into a beautiful new reality that honors its history and the people who created it, only a national transformation will “restore soul back to our cities.”
hopefully you find comfort downtown. But if not, we’ve brought you enough cigarette filters to make a decent winter coat
*Pay Me Back In Children*
a special species of handshake let’s all know who’s king and what the lifespan is of uniform cloth
— and other book titles pulled out of a drum solo
*They Hung Up Their Bodies In Their Own Museums*
RUN HERE, HERO! — lied the hiding place
this coffin needs to quit acting like those are birds singing those rusty nails have no wings and have no voice other than a white world dying there are indeed book pages in the gas pump catchy isn’t it? the way three nooses is the rule the way potato sack masks go well with radio codes
Or the way condemned Africans fought their way back to the ocean only to find waves made of burned up 1920’s piano parts European backdoor deals and red flowers for widows who spend all day in the sun mumbling at San Francisco “what’s the color of a doctor visit?”
all the bullets in ten precincts know where to go no heaven (nor any other good ideas) are in the sky politics means: people did it and people do it. understand that when in San Francisco and other places that were never really there bet this ocean thinks it’s an ocean but it’s not. it’s seventh and mission.
“All know who is king. King of thin things. Like america. I’m proud to deserve to die … I will eat my dinner extra slow tonight in this police state candy dispenser that you all call a neighborhood … “
Book titles in the street like: “I left my watch on the public bathroom sink and took the toilet with me. I threw it at the first bus I saw eating single mothers half alive. It flew through the line number … then on out the front of the white house”
*Hero, You’d Make A Better Zero* *Fur Coat Lady, The President Is Dead*
no set of manners goes unpunished never mind about a murderer’s insomnia or the tea kettle preparing everyone for police sirens
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