Yeah, uh, here’s the highlight of District Five Supervisor London Breed’s stream-of consciousness interview with Andrew Dudley of Haighteration, mind you, this was back in 2013:
“What everyone talks about, as a gimmick, is “affordable housing.” I served on the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Commission. We build tons of units of affordable housing, only to watch as people who live across the street from these units, who deserve to have access to these units, because of the lottery system and an organization — I’m not going to call any names, but they’re very organized, and they monopolize a lot of the affordable housing developments. So what happens to the person suffering through six roommates who wants to go to the next level? What happens to the people who want to come out of public housing and go to the next level? What happens to the people who suffered through, listening to the hammers and the construction and the lack of parking and everything else, why do they not have the ability to access this affordable housing? It’s because there’s one small group of people who control it, and they could care less who actually gets it.
That’s number one. Number two, you have some people being pushed out of affordable housing, and then you have others that are moving into that housing. And sometimes, the people who are in these different public housing developments — and I’m not discriminating against anyone, but sometimes they’re not even U.S. citizens — we are not doing enough to look at the people who are here now, and how we can help protect the folks who are here now and give them access to affordable housing. We’re so concerned about people coming from another state, or people coming from another country, making San Francisco attractive for everybody — except people who live here!
And I don’t mind people coming and moving here. I love diversity. I love meeting new people with new experiences. I love the different cultures — I think it’s great and makes San Francisco what it is — but we’re also continuing down a really dangerous path of wealthy and poor, and no in between. No place to go for the middle class. No place to go for the people who have stepped right out of poverty. No place. And the fact that I’m holding on for dear life, and I’m now the Supervisor — it’s really scary to me. We’ve got to look at all this affordable housing that we build, and how do we really give people opportunities. We get money from the federal government for housing, and they require a lottery system. But is it really diversity if one ethnic group monopolizes the lottery and gets all of the affordable units?”
Yowzer.
(So when Asians and Asian-Americans complain of being bullied by African Americans in San Francisco public housing, this is the nativist attitude* that they are referencing.)
Does one ethnic group in S.F. get _all_ the affordable units in San Francisco? Really?
And I’ll have to say that somebody sure still sounds pissed over stuff like this fundraising for Christina Olague:
On it goes.
*The last time I’ve heard this issue discussed in the media was when former Mayor Willie Brown (apparently improperly) intervened in an individual case to get the only Asian / Asian-American family out of one particular PJ and into another PJ that already had Asian / Asian-Americans. They might have been the relatives of the woman who did his nails, something like that. This was in the 1990’s.
