San Francisco Blog

A bit of background: In 2005 the city said that SOMA, an area with several “traditional” and impoverished communities that had been shaken by the influx of dot.com money and then stirred by the dot.bust, needed “stabilization.” So they announced a fee of $14 per foot of new residential development, and set the money aside to be put in a special “SOMA Stabilization Fund.”

By this summer, according to city estimates, that fund will have some $7 million in it. Naturally, they want to spend it.

But how? The answer they came up with: Ask a committee. So the “Soma Community Stabilization Fund Community Advisory Committee” was created, and told to come up with a plan.

The committee, according to its Chair Jazzie Collins, met once a month for 18 months and had 3 public hearings, where they let members of the public talk as long as they wanted about the things that concerned them … apparently believing that if you let the public talk more, it will become more clear what they want.

Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. If you let the public talk more, they just talk more. Their message does not improve.

The plan to come out of this procedure is equally rambling. It has four “overarching goals” 1) to “Strengthen Community Cohesion” (why is “community cohesion” capitalized?); 2) to “Support economic and workforce development for low income residents and businesses that serve the SOMA community; 3) to “Increase access to perpetually affordable housing opportunities for existing residents of SOMA”; and 4) “Improve the infrastructure and physical environment.”

Then they have two “Overarching Strategies,” one of which comes in four parts – basically they say they’ll leverage dollars by investing in endowments, land trusts, and grantors who will match funds, and “leverage community assets” by investing in infrastructure.

Got it?

I hope so, because THEN they have “objectives” for each “overarching strategy” and “activities” for each “objective.” (You can read the whole thing here in PDF form, if you like)

To the extent that there’s a bottom line here, it’s this: anything that sounds nice for SOMA can tap into a $7 million pot … there’s no basis in the report to reject an activity, no matter how stupid. Perfectly good criteria, like “Enhance and increase access to services for packaging loans, lease negotiation, incubation, etc.” sit side-by-side with pap like supporting “cross-class interaction.”

So … after 18 months, what’s the plan? It’s EVERYTHING. It’s all too clear that instead of asking the public to make choices, they just took down every wish list item people brought to their attention, and plan to fund that.

How do we justify this? The San Francisco way: by talking about what a great experience the process was.

The first member of the public to defend it said that there was “a lot of spirit” at these meetings. Terrific!

The second speaker said that the volunteer board worked really hard. Really really hard. Like: one meeting a month hard.

Yeah.

Another speaker talked about how the committee had had “countless town hall meetings.” Ah, no, actually, there were 3 of them. Remember? Someone was counting.

Not one person actually defends anything specific in the plan … because really there’s nothing to defend. Just a lot of “hard” work that, in the end, tells us almost nothing about how the money will actually be spent.

Sadly, the Supervisors didn't ask any tough questions either: they just passed it on, with a recommendation, to the full board.

The issues here are serious: $7 million seems like a lot more than it is when it comes to redeveoping neighborhoods, and SOMA has got real problems. But working "hard" isn't nearly as effective for solving them as thinking "clearly." Far be it from San Francisco to subject a potential boondoggle to scrutiny, but, you might, just might, want to look this over one more time and ask "What the fuck?"

It won't be hard work at all.