by Mike Miller on July 31, 2023 (BeyondChron.org)
Mike Miller was staff director of MCO–the Mission Coalition Organization
People Power Can Revive San Francisco
A cursory observation of the State of the City indicates that institutions are failing to accomplish the purposes most San Franciscans assume them competent to achieve. The police department seems incapable of enforcing the law in the face of multiple daily reports from residents of porch package theft, automobile break-ins, street purse snatching, catalytic converters disappearing, open drug dealing and more, while at the same time able to arrest dozens of young people engaged in a street skateboarding adventure.
Continually sky-rocketing housing (and other) costs drive more and more low-to-middle income out of town. Reform candidates are elected, but can’t seem to accomplish the task. Centrists somehow expect private sector “economic development” like upzoning to magically do more than leave people on the street and force others to join them. It surely will not slow, halt and reverse gentrification.
Reporting in the June 22, 2023 San Francisco Standard, writer Joe Burns reveals:
San Francisco City Hall’s open job rate has more than doubled since the pandemic. It takes the city eight months on average to hire someone.
San Francisco is short more than 4,000 workers to run its Muni transit system, 911 call center, police department, hospitals and other critical agencies. But the city is taking an average of 255 days to fill each job, according to a San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report released Wednesday.
The report says the effects of understaffed critical city services are everywhere…
Another recent grand jury investigation found that almost a quarter of teachers in San Francisco public schools during the 2020-21 school year were not fully credentialed and deemed 10% of teacher assignments “ineffective,” as the San Francisco Unified School District’s teacher shortage continues.
Who Participates Now?
From a 2020 peak of more than 800,000 people, our city’s population has shrunk to about 720,000. We seem more successful at driving people from their homes than creating a city that welcomes them. In 2022, about 500,000 of them were registered to vote, with 310,000 voting. Taking into account greater propensity to vote among those more formally educated, it is likely that a majority of people adversely affected by the status quo don’t vote.
A trusted layer of activists will show up to protest present indignities and often offer constructive alternatives. But they are themselves insulated from majorities because of the weaknesses of their own organizing. Without a continuing majority of people participating directly or indirectly in the on-going process of politics, it is unlikely that things will change as a result of elections.
A majority of residents is not registered. We need something more to make The City work than our present electoral participation, activist lobbying of decision-makers or demonstrations against them. “The System” now has mechanisms to absorb all of these. To overcome them and system inertia that makes change difficult, thousands of people need to be directly involved, not dozens or even hundreds.
What Is To Be Done?
People can use their First Amendment rights to speak, assemble and act outside the formal political system, and to create horizontal relations among them that bridge lines of division by income, race, ethnicity, age, supervisory district, immigrant status, ideology and formal political party affiliation. That can begin with conversations in your building or on your block.
What might it look like?
These are suggestions. Some may lead to dead ends; some may create positive results; others might have some promise but need tweaking. The common theme to all of them is they shift people from non-participation to ongoing participation in the life of their neighborhoods and city that is initially independent of public bodies or their activity (hearings, lobbying, voting).
Neighbors need to walk the streets: With whistles and walkie talkies in hand, they can patrol against crime; with cameras they can capture the cars and faces of criminals; with spray paint and other methods to mark get-away cars so cops can identify them, they can slow down and reverse present neighborhood crime. Down the road they need to connect with their local precincts so glitches in systems of rapid communication with the police can be overcome. When they have demonstrated their numbers to be in the thousands, they can lobby for more foot and bicycle patrols.
People working in high-rise and other buildings along downtown Market, Mission and other streets, where people without homes spend their time trying to live, can talk with one another about how the vacant spaces in their buildings might become temporary night-time housing; how to protect against vandalism if this is done; how to connect people in need with resources that might now be available. Add small business women and men to the mix! In days gone by, people volunteered in settlement houses to “help the poor.” Those who so engage need to teach themselves how to respect the people they want to help, and not treat them in condescending or paternalistic ways—instead with dignity and respect.
School people (students, parents, teachers, service workers and administrators) should talk with one another about non-class time uses of their facilities. Can’t school gym showers be used by people who now lack access to them? Can’t school cafeterias be places to feed hungry people early in the morning or late in the day? The same conversations can take place among Recreation and Park Department facility users and hands-on staff. Ditto Health Department. You get the idea.
My intent here is to do more than solve existing social problems, though that is necessary. These conversations must take place outside The City’s bureaucratic and political organizational forms because at the present time they are often the source of problems, not their solution.
An external set of horizontal relationships has to be built or renewed that takes everyday people outside their present and growing isolation, aided and abetted by the internet, into continuing face-to-face relationships with one another, and across lines of division that now create “The Other.”
Mutual aid can be a tool for this renewal. A vast array of forms of cooperation exists that can be used to enhance neighborliness: sports teams, community gardens, buying clubs, childcare pools, home tutoring centers and more can solve immediate problems and be centers of community-building.
A Time-Out To Build People Power
Building horizontal relationships is a process that can lead to more effectively organized people power. The rule of thumb in the beginning is to do more than testifying, lobbying, picketing or otherwise engaging with The City. That process that has created multiple silos of fragmented interest, alienation from politics, a layer of nonprofits that treats people as clients rather than participants, and a cadre of activists who have lost touch with those in whose name and interest they presume to speak and act.
Mike Miller is a native San Franciscan. He grew up in Sunnydale Housing Project, graduated from Balboa High School, got a BA from the University of California, and was involved in 1960 – 1980s community organizing in The City. More on him and his work can be found at <www.organizetrainingcenter.org>
