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You call this a free election?
The international community sends watchdogs to monitor foreign elections -- that's just what America needs in 2000.
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[11/03/99]

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[11/02/99]

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[11/02/99]

Quiet bombshell in Matthew Shepard trial
Judge Barton Voigt throws out the gay panic defense, gutting the case for a manslaughter conviction in place of murder.
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[11/01/99]

I am woman, hear me Gore
Is feminist author and Gore 2000 advisor Naomi Wolf earth-toning the vice president or just destroying his credibility?
By Jake Tapper
[11/01/99]

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This may be the most unlivable city in America, but too many of its residents are lost in such a haze of self-righteous entitlement and aggrieved internecine warfare that they don't even seem to know it. And the things that are wrong with San Francisco were so many years, so many decades, in the making, that it's absurd to think the Internet had anything to do with it.

Tuesday's local election was a case in point. It featured a pernicious charlatan incumbent (Willie Brown) running against an unprincipled political operative (Clint Reilly, who has not contradicted reports that he beat his former girlfriend) and a genial Republican chucklehead (former Mayor Frank Jordan). Brown has outraged everyone: He combines old-fashioned Democratic hackdom with a complete inability to do anything about the city's problems. Note to Brown: The '70s are over, and mayors no longer award bounty to their cronies while letting the city go to hell. From New York to Chicago to Seattle, even across the bay in Jerry Brown's Oakland, big city mayors have actually learned how to make big cities livable. (Make this point in San Francisco, of course, and you'll be considered a jack-booted Rudy Giuliani lover.)

But though final election results aren't in yet, it's clear Brown's not going to be bounced out of office, despite the dysfunction and cronyism. Supervisor Tom Ammiano made the race interesting as a last-minute write-in candidate, but his late entry into the race (a representative case of S.F. leftist incompetence, but I voted for him anyway) makes it unlikely that he'll win. Brown seems destined for a run-off, however, which will give his opponents another shot at him.

There's so much wrong with the notion that the Internet is ruining San Francisco. Most of the complainers are really deriding the economic development that has made this city a more vital place in the last seven or eight years. Economic development is generally a good thing. It gives people jobs, where they make money, which they can spend on local businesses.

If you're going to have economic development, there are worse kinds to have than computer-related industries. They're eco-friendly. They pay well. Their politics are such that they're generally good corporate citizens, supporting biking to work and so forth. And it's probably worth saying that the products they produce are, in a fundamental way, democratizing and empowering. In San Francisco, it betters the lives of the people in the city in any number of ways, and produces increased tax revenues, which the city can use (one hopes) to do beneficial things with.

The problems attributed to this phenomenon, in other words, are those you'd get with any growing economy. I worked near South Park, ground zero for the South of Market cyber culture, for three years and couldn't find much to complain about. The biggest complaint you hear about the "dot-com" people is that they actually do work. This is a concept that is foreign to many San Franciscans, so it's easy to see why it's treated with such wariness.

I don't think the dot-com people are what's wrong with the city. Here's a list of actual problems:

1) Housing is too expensive and there's not enough of it. San Francisco has a rent-control law, which, despite loopholes, does limit rent increases, and makes it relatively difficult to evict people without cause. But while the city needs to protect its current residents in this way, it also needs to aggressively build new housing. There are many complicated political reasons why this has not been the case, but part of it is that neighborhood residents have effective veto power over development. In the meantime, you can see two corollary effects: A steady displacement of the poor (because each time an apartment is vacated, it is generally filled with a person of a much-higher income) and the decline in the living standards of those who do stay, as they double and triple up in apartments.

But why are the dot-com people worse than anybody else driving up housing costs? The weekly alternative San Francisco Bay Guardian is known as a crusader against gentrification, whether of the dot-com variety or not. One of the up-and-coming neighborhoods it loudly and lamely wants to protect is Bernal Heights, where its executive editor lives with his wife, dog and baby. He works at a fat, for-profit newspaper; his wife is a lawyer. Why are they not gentrifiers? In San Francisco, clearly, gentrification doesn't officially begin until the loudest yuppies are safely ensconced.

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