How Young Donald Learned To Weaponize His Racism

Over the weekend, a tweet from Ro Khanna alerted me to a favorite Trump shenanigan-- a roll back to an Obama housing desegregation rule. The very first time the name "Donald J. Trump" appeared in the New York Times, a thrill for the young publicity hound, was in connection to a government law suit in which he and his crooked, racist father were charged with violating a civil rights act in regard to housing. In short, they were refusing to rent apartments to blacks and hispanics even though the properties were built with government loans that prohibited racial discrimination. When the Trumps were able to worm their way out of it with countersuits and by making themselves unbearably annoying it set Trump on a path of action about how to get away with criminal behavior that is apparent today-- and in every phase of his miserable life.

A few months before he managed to steal the 2016 election, the New York Times reprised that episode: 'No Vacancies' For Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, And Was First Accused Of Bias. Jonathan Mahler and Steve Eder reported on the Trumps' "practice of turning away potential black tenants [which] was painstakingly documented by activists and organizations that viewed equal housing as the next frontier in the civil rights struggle."

The Justice Department undertook its own investigation and, in 1973, sued Trump Management for discriminating against blacks. Both Fred Trump, the company’s chairman, and Donald Trump, its president, were named as defendants. It was front-page news, and for Donald, amounted to his debut in the public eye.

“Absolutely ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying of the government’s allegations.

Looking back, Mr. Trump’s response to the lawsuit can be seen as presaging his handling of subsequent challenges, in business and in politics. Rather than quietly trying to settle-- as another New York developer had done a couple of years earlier-- he turned the lawsuit into a protracted battle, complete with angry denials, character assassination, charges that the government was trying to force him to rent to “welfare recipients” and a $100 million countersuit accusing the Justice Department of defamation.

When it was over, Mr. Trump declared victory, emphasizing that the consent decree he ultimately signed did not include an admission of guilt.

But an investigation by the New York Times-- drawing on decades-old files from the New York City Commission on Human Rights, internal Justice Department records, court documents and interviews with tenants, civil rights activists and prosecutors-- uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond.

...[Fred Trump's] establishment as one of the city’s biggest developers was hardly free of controversy: The Senate Banking Committee subpoenaed him in 1954 during an investigation into profiteering off federal housing loans. Under oath, he acknowledged that he had wildly overstated the costs of a development to obtain a larger mortgage from the government.

In 1966, as the investigative journalist Wayne Barrett detailed in “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth,” a New York legislative committee accused Fred Trump of using state money earmarked for middle-income housing to build a shopping center instead. One lawmaker called Mr. Trump “greedy and grasping.”

By this point, the Trump organization’s business practices were beginning to come under scrutiny from civil rights groups that had received complaints from prospective African-American tenants.

People like Maxine Brown.

Mr. Leibowitz, the rental agent at the Wilshire, remembered Ms. Brown repeatedly inquiring about the apartment. “Finally, she realized what it was all about,” he said.

Ms. Brown’s first instinct was to let the matter go; she was happy enough at the Y.W.C.A. “I had a big room and two meals a day for five dollars a week,” she said in an interview.

But a friend, Mae Wiggins, who had also been denied an apartment at the Wilshire, told her that she ought to have her own place, with a private bathroom and a kitchen. She encouraged Ms. Brown to file a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, as she was doing.

“We knew there was prejudice in renting,” Ms. Wiggins recalled. “It was rampant in New York. It made me feel really bad, and I wanted to do something to right the wrong.”





Mr. Leibowitz was called to testify at the commission’s hearing on Ms. Brown’s case. Asked to estimate how many blacks lived in Mr. Trump’s various properties, he remembered replying: “To the best of my knowledge, none.”

After the hearing, Ms. Brown was offered an apartment in the Wilshire, and in the spring of 1964, she moved in. For 10 years, she said, she was the only African-American in the building.

Complaints about the Trump organization’s rental policies continued to mount: By 1967, state investigators found that out of some 3,700 apartments in Trump Village, seven were occupied by African-American families.

Like Ms. Brown, the few minorities who did live in Trump-owned buildings often had to force their way in.

...Unlike the public schools, the housing market could not be desegregated simply by court order. Even after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited racial discrimination in housing, developments in white neighborhoods continued to rebuff blacks.

For years, it fell largely to local civil rights groups to highlight the problem by sending white “testers” into apartment complexes after blacks had been turned away.

“Everything was sort of whispers and innuendo and you wanted to try to bring it out into the open,” recalled Phyllis Kirschenbaum, who volunteered for Operation Open City, a housing rights advocacy organization. “I’d walk in with my freckles and red hair and Jewish name and get an apartment immediately.”

...Donald Trump said he had first heard about the lawsuit, which was filed in the fall of 1973, on his car radio.

The government had charged him, his father and their company, Trump Management Inc., with violating the Fair Housing Act.

Another major New York developer, the LeFrak Organization, had been hit with a similar suit a few years earlier. Its founder, Samuel LeFrak, had appeared at a news conference alongside the United States attorney, trumpeting a consent agreement to prohibit discrimination in his buildings by saying it would “make open housing in our cities a reality.” The LeFrak company even offered the equivalent of one month’s rent to help 50 black families move into predominantly white buildings.

Donald Trump took a different approach. He retained Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting counsel, Roy Cohn, to defend him. Mr. Trump soon called his own news conference-- to announce his countersuit against the government.

The government’s lawyers took as their starting point the years of research conducted by civil rights groups at Trump properties.

“We did our own investigation and enlarged the case,” said Elyse Goldweber, who as a young assistant United States attorney worked on the lawsuit, U.S.A. v. Trump.

A former Trump superintendent named Thomas Miranda testified that multiple Trump Management employees had instructed him to attach a separate piece of paper with a big letter “C” on it-- for “colored”-- to any application filed by a black apartment-seeker.

The Trumps went on the offensive, filing a contempt-of-court charge against one of the prosecutors, accusing her of turning the investigation into a “Gestapo-like interrogation.” The Trumps derided the lawsuit as a pressure tactic to get them to sign a consent decree like the one agreed to by Mr. LeFrak.

The judge dismissed both the countersuit and the contempt-of-court charge. After nearly two years of legal wrangling, the Trumps gave up and signed a consent decree.

As is customary, it did not include an admission of guilt. But it did include pages of stipulations intended to ensure the desegregation of Trump properties.

Equal housing activists celebrated the agreement as more robust than the one signed by Mr. LeFrak. It required that Trump Management provide the New York Urban League with a weekly list of all its vacancies.

This did not stop Mr. Trump from declaring victory. “In the end the government couldn’t prove its case, and we ended up making a minor settlement without admitting any guilt,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal.

Only this was not quite the end.

A few years later, the government accused the Trumps of violating the consent decree. “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote to Mr. Cohn in 1978.

Once again, the government marshaled numerous examples of blacks being denied Trump apartments. But this time, it also identified a pattern of racial steering.

While more black families were now renting in Trump-owned buildings, the government said, many had been confined to a small number of complexes. And tenants in some of these buildings had complained about the conditions, from falling plaster to rusty light fixtures to bloodstained floors.

The Trumps effectively wore the government down. The original consent decree expired before the Justice Department had accumulated enough evidence to press its new case.

This past October, ACLU staffers Linda Morris and Alejandro Ortiz, warned that Trump was about to slam the door on fair housing: Trump Administration's new rule would dismantle critical housing protections for the most vulnerable and marginalized communities. It's as though Trump was looking for revenge against a government that called him and his family out on their racism. "Fifty years after the enactment of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), housing discrimination remains a national disgrace in the United States. Across the country, a growing tide of housing providers, perhaps emboldened by Trump’s anti-“other” rhetoric, discriminate against the very communities the FHA was designed to protect. In 2017 alone, there were nearly 29,000 reported complaints of housing discrimination across the country. Despite growing diversity in population, residential segregation persists at alarming rates hurting local schools, property values, and much more. Just this year, Black homeownership rates dropped to a record low of 40.6% which is the lowest level recorded by the Census Bureau since 1950. Despite this ongoing crisis, the Trump Administration proposed a new rule that will dismantle critical housing protections for the most vulnerable and marginalized communities.

In one of this administration’s most outrageous attacks on civil rights yet, the proposed rule will make a mockery of one of the FHA’s most critical enforcement tools: the Disparate Impact Rule. The Rule allows potential victims of housing discrimination to challenge unjustified policies or practices that disproportionately harm them. Courts have recognized disparate impact liability under the FHA for decades, culminating in the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision affirming disparate impact liability in Texas Department of Housing & Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project.  There, the Court explained the significance of disparate impact liability: “[H]ousing restrictions that function unfairly to exclude minorities from certain neighborhoods without any sufficient justification . . . reside at the heartland of disparate-impact liability.” Under the Obama administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) acknowledged this principle by formally codifying the Disparate Impact Rule in 2013, and consistently affirming the existing Disparate Impact Rule through its fair housing enforcement and guidance as recently as 2016.

...Why does Trump want to undermine this rule? Because it works. Disparate impact liability is a tool like none other in the law with numerous examples of how it has helped dismantle the many systemic barriers to fair housing. The Disparate Impact Rule has been critical in challenging covert or disguised forms of housing discrimination that otherwise escape easy classification. Advocates have invoked the Disparate Impact Rule in challenging discriminatory zoning regulations, predatory mortgage lending practices that charge excessive rates to people of color or people with disabilities, overly restrictive occupancy requirements that shut out families with children, and policies that threaten housing for survivors of gender-based violence and women of color.

By early January, HUD was proposing a rule that would redefine the way jurisdictions are required to promote fair housing and scrap a key assessment tool used to map racial segregation under the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. The 2015 rule-- which the Obama administration introduced as a way to beef up enforcement of the landmark Fair Housing Act of 1968-- required local governments to track patterns of poverty and segregation with a checklist of 92 questions in order to gain access to federal housing funds.

Lisa Rice, executive vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, said the proposal is "a step in the wrong direction. It would weaken fair housing enforcement and basically abdicate jurisdictions and public housing authorities from their fair housing responsibilities. It’s even weaker than the scheme that HUD had before the 2015 rule was implemented …That’s the system that the [Government Accountability Office] found to be completely inept and ineffective."

“The Obama administration’s fair housing rule made the strongest effort in decades to reverse harmful patterns of segregation and discriminatory practices in communities across the country,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Carson, the only black member of President Donald Trump's cabinet, “is scrapping years of extensive input and intensive work that went into the fair housing rule and essentially reverting to the agency’s previous flawed and failed system,” Yentel said.

Boston progressive congressional candidate, Brianna Wu told me that affordable housing is the single biggest issue for many voters in her district. "Of course Trump would reverse any protections to end segregation and discrimination of affordable housing," she said. "Any initiative from the Obama Administration that actually works and helps people is on Trump’s hit list. This is yet another example of Trump’s blatant racism and trying to line his pockets. Affordable housing and gentrification is a significant issue in Boston and other areas of my district. My opponent, Stephen Lynch, has been silent on the issue to appeal to his donors from the real estate industry. I know this has been said many times before, but it bears repeating-- elections have consequences. If we keep electing real estate 'moguls' and representatives who are owned by the real estate industry, change will never happen. We have a lot of work to do, and truly affordable housing for all will be a top priority for me when I get to Congress, both for my district and the nation."

Forget Gentrification-- Our Great Cities Are Being Afflicted With Full-On Plutocratization

The new issue of the Harvard Business Review carried an adaptation by urbanologist Richard Florida from his new book, The New Urban Crisis, warning about "a sterile sameness" that's been hard to miss taking over cities we all used to love and feel inspired by. I don't think Florida is as worried about it as I am... but he's worried too.

Every time I have visited London over the past several years, I invariably hear the same story from my taxi driver. As we drive past Hyde Park on the way to or from the airport, he will say, “You see that building?” nodding towards a modern glass tower next to the Mandarin Oriental hotel. “Some of the apartments cost £50 million or more. And no one lives there—it’s always dark.”

London, New York, and Paris are being overtaken over by an invasion of the global super-rich, which one writer described as a shift from mere gentrification to full-on “plutocratization.” According to some, this influx is driving artists from cities, turning them into what musician David Byrne called “pleasure domes for the rich.” For a growing number of musicians and artists, the transformation of our cities is personal and palpable. Yes, there’s a certain irony in the spectacle of highly successful rock stars pining after the good old days of cheap rent, cheap drinks, and creative nirvana, even if we can empathize with their frustration at CBGB’s being turned into an upscale clothing store. But artists’ complaints reflect the increasingly intense competition for urban space. Artists, musicians, and other creatives who helped transform old, neglected urban spaces into studios and workspaces in the 1970s and 1980s are being elbowed out of those same places by investment bankers, business professionals, techies, and even the global super-rich.



There’s little doubt that creative urban ecosystems exist in a precarious balance. Take away the ferment that comes from urban mixing, and the result is a sterile sameness. In SoHo today, luxury shops seem to outnumber performance spaces and studios. But even if rising housing prices are making it harder for a new generation of artists and creatives to get a toehold in SoHo and neighborhoods like it, that doesn’t mean that entire cities have become creative dead zones.

So does this change really threaten the creativity of our most vibrant cities? Despite the influx of wealthy people into the urban core and the transformation of some leading creative neighborhoods, there is little evidence of any substantial diminution of these cities’ overall creative capacities. Cities are big places, after all; creativity can and does move from neighborhood to neighborhood. In time, the ongoing transformation of these cities may truly jeopardize their creative impetus, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The global super-rich who are snapping up real estate in superstar cities aren’t really buying “homes,” in the conventional sense of that term, to live in and use. They aren’t looking for places to raise their families or to do productive work. Instead, they’re looking for safe places to park their money. If luxury real estate was once the most obvious way to measure and display wealth as “conspicuous consumption,” it has become something more mundane today-- a new class of economic asset used to store and grow wealth.

New York and London do in fact have considerable shares of the world’s wealthiest people. New York tops the list with more than 100 billionaires and London is sixth with 50. London leads in “ultra-high net worth” individuals with $30 million or more in assets, with New York in fourth place.

But, do the super-rich really damage great cities? While rarely occupied trophy apartments and lights-out buildings certainly make neighborhoods less vibrant, there are simply not enough super-rich people to deaden an entire city or even significant parts of it. New York City, after all, has more than eight million inhabitants and some three million housing units; its 100-plus billionaires and 3,000 or so ultra-high net worth multi-millionaires wouldn’t fill half the seats in Radio City Music Hall.

Ultimately, it’s not so much a plutocratic incursion of billionaires that is transforming many of the world’s great cities, but the much greater numbers of relatively well-off people who are flocking back to them, including the growing ranks of startup entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and well-paid techies who are trading in their houses in the suburbs for condos, apartments, and townhouses in the city.

The movement of urban high-tech startup companies and talent into urban centers is a real sea change. The leading high tech companies of the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s and even the early 2000s-- like Intel, Apple, and Google-- were all housed in corporate campuses in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s headquarters was in suburban Redmond, Washington. Other high-tech companies clustered along the Route 128 suburbs outside Boston, in the suburbs of Austin, or the office parks of North Carolina’s Research Triangle.

That geography has changed dramatically as venture capital investment and startup companies have become much more urban.  Today, dense, urban San Francisco tops suburban Silicon Valley’s as the world’s number one location for venture capital-backed startups. New York City-- and in particular a small area of Lower Manhattan-- is second. Across the U.S., more than half of venture capital investment and nearly six in ten of U.S. startups are in urban zip codes.

Startups and cities are a natural match. Urban areas provide the diversity, creative energy, cultural richness, vibrant street-life, and openness to new ideas that the talent who launch and work for startups is looking for. Their industrial and warehouse buildings provide flexible and reconfigurable work spaces. While many large, well-established tech companies which require large headquarter sites-- like Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook to name a few-- remain in the suburbs, the startups that power innovation and growth draw their strength and inspiration from cities.

Cities also help new companies attract talent. Today’s hottest startups concentrate on digital and social media, games, and creative applications, which draw on the deep pools of designers, composers, scenarists, musicians, marketers, and copywriters that can be found in cities.

Still, as technology companies and techies who work for them head back to cities, they are increasingly being blamed for their deepening problems of housing affordability and urban inequality. In spring 2014, protests broke out in Oakland against the private buses that shuttle tech workers from their homes in the city’s gentrifying urban core to their jobs in the corporate campuses of Silicon Valley. In San Francisco’s Mission District, protestors dressed as clowns formed human pyramids, bounced giant exercise balls, and performed the can-can in front of a Google bus.

To what extent are urban startups and the techies who are increasingly settling in cities responsible for rising urban housing prices, inequality, and gentrification? On this, the evidence is actually mixed. There’s no question that the urban tech incursion has put pressure on housing costs, especially in cities like San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Seattle. The connections between economic inequality and urban tech are less clear-cut, however. For instance, the presence of startups and venture capital correlate with some measures of inequality but not others. Moreover, tech companies are huge drivers of innovation, economic growth, jobs, and much-needed tax revenues that cities can use to address and mitigate the problems that come with them.

There can be no doubt that the recent influx of the very rich, of tech startups and their employees, and of financial and other professionals into cities is generating real challenges and prompting highly charged conflicts. But has it blunted those cities’ cultural creativity, as some have charged? In a word, no: The creative strengths of superstar cities have actually increased.

The concentration of creative industries and creative jobs in superstar cities like New York and LA remains strong. LA’s concentration of artistic and creative fields across the board is nearly three times the national average, while New York’s is more than double. LA’s concentration of fine artists, painters and sculptors is nearly four times as high as the national average; New York’s is one-and-a-half times as high. New York has nearly three times and LA more than twice the national average for musicians and singers. Both metros have more than three times the national average for writers and authors. And New York’s concentration of fashion designers is ten times higher than the national average, while LA’s is nearly eight times higher.

But, for all of the dire warnings coming from established musicians and artists, these cities are at least as artistically creative as they ever were, and even more technologically innovative. On the whole, their creative economies are considerably stronger than they were back in the 1970s and 1980s. Would anyone really want to trade New York’s or LA’s economies today for their economic situation back in the 1970s or 80s? The answer is obvious. The addition of high tech to these cities’ traditional strengths in artistic creativity, has made their economies stronger.

Put bluntly, some of the noisiest controversies regarding our changing cities spring from the competing factions of a new urban elite. The much bigger problem is the widening gap between this relatively advantaged class and everyone else. It’s the poor and the working classes who are truly being displaced and shunted aside in our thriving cities, and the way to help them is not to turn off the spigot of wealth creation, but to make their flourishing economies more encompassing and inclusive.

We spoke with San Francisco author and anti-gentrification activist Denise Sullivan about Florida's assertions. "All these great new conveniences and services that the newly rich and super-rich insist upon," she reminded us, "don't actually enhance the quality of life; rather, they detract from the joys of city living, the reasons people traditionally creative people gravitated to city centers." She explained:

Take the ride share apps: You never have to interact with a person on the street or a person on the bus or a parking lot attendant. How is this different from mom or dad picking you up from soccer practice?

Artists, service workers, the middle class, can no longer function in a town that strives to serve and cater to the whims of the newly rich, the super-rich, and worst of all, the wannabe rich: I mean, who gets driven around except people who want to perceive themselves as being the driven? Frankly, I'd rather be the driver. Or maybe I should say, I relate more to the drivers. Of course most of them live in Fremont (a once undesirable suburb about 40 miles South of Oakland which now you're lucky if you can find a place to rent or own there).

The homogenous culture of San Francisco is heartbreaking:The disappearance of African American and Latino families, the middle or creative (and I don't mean tech creative) class, the small businesses that can no longer survive… but the real human tragedy is the housing crisis and its become a matter of human rights. The homelessness, the police violence/racial profiling, and even the mental health issues wrought by gentrification and all that goes with it are very real here. Talk to anyone who lives in a tent city, which according to some studies will tell you the occupants are over 70% San Franciscan. This is the real, live, in-progress, demonstration of how the super rich have destroyed us and how poor in spirit we've become as a city, as a society. We need to feed, cloth, and house our poor. We aren't doing it. I see that as a complete failure and collapse of civil society.

The other person we asked about this is progressive Democratic candidate Katie Hill, who's running for a swing district seat the encompasses Simi Valley, Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley just north of L.A. She runs a non-profit that's dedicated to helping homeless veterans find housing and get their lives back on track. After reading Florida's piece, she pointed out that "The housing crisis in L.A. and other thriving cities is a manifestation of income inequality and the ever-shrinking middle class. It could not be clearer than the high-end lofts we see now right next to Skid Row-- where the masses of homeless encampments make it look like we're stepping into a third world country." She elucidated:

The reality is that we have a lot of well-paying jobs-- in fact, many employers, including PATH, have a hard time finding and retaining qualified people for their most needed positions. But people coming from disadvantaged economic positions have so many factors working against them from birth that getting to the point of a master's degree or whatever other qualification is required for those high paying jobs is nearly impossible. They get stuck, lacking education and opportunity, in a cycle of low wage jobs (or worse, addiction, crime, and incarceration).

In L.A. county, studies show that someone needs to make more than $18 an hour to afford a studio apartment. Sadly, most of the jobs people without a degree qualify for come nowhere near that.

  It's no wonder we have have so much homelessness. Until we deal with the underlying issues-- income inequality, housing affordability, the class division that has happened and everything that goes with that-- we always will.

Trump Didn't Cause The Urban Housing Bubble, But His Policies Are Likely To Make It Worse

Last week, urbanologist Richard Florida did a post ostensibly about Vancouver, but completely relevant to all the great cities of the West. As he said, "Young, affluent, highly educated people have flowed back to downtown cores in cities like London, New York, San Francisco and Vancouver. Good jobs, better restaurants, higher tax revenues and even high-tech startups have followed. But this dramatic back-to-the-city movement also has its dark side, giving rise to what I call the new urban crisis, which registers itself in increasingly unaffordable housing and a growing divide between rich and poor.

Rising inequality in Vancouver is driven by the decline in stable, blue-collar, middle-class jobs, which make up just 15 per cent of the region’s jobs. Highly paid professional, knowledge and creative jobs make up 36.5 per cent of jobs, while lower-paid service jobs account for 47 per cent of jobs.

Vancouver is seeing not just the decline of its middle class, but of the neighbourhoods such families called home. Middle-class areas, which made up more than 70 per cent of Vancouver neighbourhoods in 1970, have fallen to less than half by 2005, the last year for which data is available. There are likely far fewer today.

As the educated and affluent flock back to urban cores, a great deal of poverty in cities like Vancouver has shifted to the suburbs. Indeed, these places are morphing into a new kind of “patchwork metropolis,” with small areas of the advantaged concentrated downtown near subway and transit stations or in affluent suburban areas, surrounded by much larger spans of concentrated disadvantaged.

The new urban crisis has engendered a backlash that resulted in the rise of the late mayor Rob Ford in Toronto, the Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump in America.

Friday an OpEd in the NY Times by Oliver Bullough, Offshore Money, Bane of Democracy, looked at the problem from a different perspective. This is something I'm particularly tuned into right now because my best friend, an inner-city public school teacher, is trying to buy a house and keeps finding himself out-bid even in neighborhoods considered "sketchy." Here in L.A. the money buying up local real estate-- and now at every level-- in coming from China. As Bullough points out, "China was the leading investor in real estate in the United States by the end of 2015, with $350 billion in related investments and holdings."

Almost one-third of top-end property purchases in America’s biggest cities are suspect, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the body at the Treasury Department whose task it is to protect the United States from money laundering. The government recently granted FinCEN authority to peek behind the veil of secrecy provided by offshore shell companies, and what the bureau has seen is disturbing: There is a flood of dirty capital pouring into United States real estate, and it isn’t clear who owns it.

...Greedy rulers around the world steal billions from their people, then disguise the money and stash it offshore, usually in the West. The extraction of this much capital cripples the economies of source countries like Afghanistan, Nigeria or Ukraine, and breeds insecurity and violence there. Offshoring is also a problem for host states. If a government doesn’t know who owns the country it runs, how can it know how those owners will behave in a crisis?

...Law enforcement in the United States leads the world in investigating and prosecuting corruption, but the country still lags badly in terms of transparency, despite FinCEN’s new powers. Britain has a freely accessible, central online register of all companies, and anyone who creates a new company has to declare its actual owners. The system is flawed, not least because the information provided is not checked. But it’s a good first step toward ending the abuses enabled by anonymous companies. America should adopt something similar.

The British Parliament is also considering implementing “unexplained wealth orders,” which would force criminals or foreign officials to justify how they came to own luxury goods or expensive real estate. Those who cannot prove they secured the financing legally would see their property confiscated.

These two measures alone can’t be enough to reveal the true owners of the anonymous money that is buying up so much of the West. But they can go a long way toward depriving dictators and thieves of a haven for their dirty cash, while helping officials in democracies regain control over who is buying the countries they were elected to run.

How attractive will the glittering big cities remain if service workers and even middle class blue and white collar workers-- think school teachers, for example-- can't afford to live in them or even in their close-in inner suburbs? What Florida refers to as the "creative class" in his writing-- that helped spark the urban renewal-- are already being squeezed out of affordable housing in many cities en masse. 

A study provides insight into contrasting Sandy recoveries between two areas with notable similarities

DNAinfo caption: "Flooding along the East River waterfront on the Lower East Side as Hurricane Sandy barreled toward New York on Monday, Oct. 29, 2012." (Photo by Chelsia Rose Marcius)

"While both areas have high concentrations of public housing residents and low-income households, the Lower East Side’s pre-existing civic infrastructure of community based organizations and social services fighting against development pressures enabled residents to recover more quickly, according to researchers who spent six months interviewing community groups in the area and 18 months in the Rockaways. "

-- from "Anti-Gentrification Work Helped LES Bounce
Back Faster After Sandy: Study," on DNAinfo New York

Highlights of the Graham-Debucquoy study:

• Urban development paths and dynamics influence the operationalization of resilience.
• Local civic infrastructure is a key condition for community-based resilience capacity.
• Legacies of anti-gentrification activism provide a foundation for resilience work.
• Meeting present socio-economic needs may foreclose pursuing long-term resilience.

by Ken

It's clear that there are all sorts of caveats to be entered regarding the headline on this report -- notably that for all the similarities between Manhattan's Lower East Side and the Rockaways, there are (as noted in the article) important differences, and the ideological tilt of pre-existing activist organizations -- in this case gratifyingly progressive -- many not matter as much as the fact of their pre-existence. What's more, the article focuses on only one of the four report strands noted in the Highlights above.

All that said, even without reading the underlying report,* I get the feeling that there's substance here worth pondering for possible application to other areas and activist struggles.

Anti-Gentrification Work Helped LES Bounce Back Faster After Sandy: Study

By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo New York | October 24, 2016 7:41am

MANHATTAN — The low-income communities of the Lower East Side and the Rockaways both suffered extensive damage from Superstorm Sandy four years ago.

But advocates on the Lower East Side were able to engage more effectively in post-storm resiliency efforts than their counterparts in Queens because they already had a robust network of community activism in place from years of fighting gentrification, according to a recently published study from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center. [See note below about accessing the source study -- Ed.*]

Researchers focused on the role of community organizations and being able to respond to the “climate change politics” of the city, which is increasingly important as the frequency of storms is expected to rise along with rising sea levels, noted Leigh Graham, John Jay environmental psychology professor and lead author of the study.

While both areas have high concentrations of public housing residents and low-income households, the Lower East Side’s pre-existing civic infrastructure of community based organizations and social services fighting against development pressures enabled residents to recover more quickly, according to researchers who spent six months interviewing community groups in the area and 18 months in the Rockaways.

The Rockaways, on the other hand, were at a disadvantage, not only because the area is more geographically isolated on the far edge of the city, but also because it’s more racially and economically segregated.

There’s a high concentration of poverty along the eastern part of the peninsula where the residents have suffered from decades of economic “malaise,” which in effect weakened and undermined their post-storm response, researchers found.

“The Lower East Side and the Rockaways had similar levels of exposure in terms of storm flooding,” Graham said, “but the Lower East Side groups were basically a partner in a lot of the resiliency efforts after the storm, in part because residents, who live there, have been fighting gentrification for 30 to 40 years and established a level of organization, trust and power, that they were able to get a seat at the table as important stakeholders.”

Community groups on the Rockaways did not have the same level of organization prior to the storm and remain more focused on meeting present economic needs than on pursing long-term resilience planning, she noted.

“They were really dealing with economic stagnation and hardship that only worsened after the storm,” Graham said.

“The Rockaways was in crisis before Sandy hit, it continues to be in crisis, it’s an economic crisis,” one affordable housing advocate said in the report. “And so the resiliency work doesn’t just sort of happen in a vacuum, it sits on top of what’s there already in that community.”

Also, Rockaway residents have long been more aware of their precarious position surrounded by water and may not have been as surprised at being hit so hard by the storm as Lower East Side residents — which also may have affected response efforts.

As a long-term Lower East Side community organizer said in the study: “Many of us have always seen ourselves as an organization that was fighting greedy landlords and luxury developers from taking over our community, we never saw a flood, that we would be fighting the impacts of climate change and sea level rise and storm surges.”

The organizer continued: “But after Sandy, it was clear to us that we couldn’t take these things for granted, so we had to adopt it as an issue and work on it in a long term way.”

Though Graham found that mobilization around resiliency lags in Rockaway as residents struggle with more immediate economic concerns, she is continuing to do research there and has been seeing changes.

The nonprofit Community Voices Heard is focusing on the climate change movement in the area, creating an organizing hub in Rockaway. The city is also investing $91 million into a revitalization plan for the area, and the Citywide Ferry is expected in a year.
Graham is hopeful these dynamics prop up the foundation of resilience work since, she said, storms and flooding will only continue.

“We know this is our new normal,” she said.

*ACCESSING THE SOURCE STUDY

As you'll discover at the link for the Graham-Debucquoy study, only readers with credentials of various sorts can access the full text free.

The site does provide the Highlights cited above as well as this Abstract:

While (urban) resilience has become an increasingly popular concept, especially in the areas of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA), it is often still used as an abstract metaphor, with much debate centered on definitions, differences in approaches, and epistemological considerations. Empirical studies examining how community-based organizations (CBOs) “practice” resilience on the ground and what enables these CBOs to organize and mobilize around resilience are lacking. Moreover, in the growing context of competitive and entrepreneurial urbanism and conflicting priorities about urban (re)development, it is unclear how urban development dynamics influence community-based resilience actions. Through empirical research conducted on the Lower East Side, a gentrifying neighborhood in Manhattan, and in Rockaway, a socio-spatially isolated neighborhood in Queens, we investigate community organizing of low-income residents for (climate) resilience in a post-disaster context. Results show that both the operationalization of resilience – how resilience is “practiced” – and the community capacity to organize for the improved resilience of low-income residents are strongly influenced by pre-existing urban development dynamics and civic infrastructure – the socio-spatial networks of community-based organizations – in each neighborhood. The Lower East Side, with its long history of community activism and awareness of gentrification threats, was better able to mobilize broadly and collectively around resilience needs while the more socio-spatially isolated neighborhoods on the Rockaway peninsula were more constrained.

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Beyond Homelessness, There is "Homefulness"

House keys not handcuffs: Melodie, 57, has been living on the street since 2007. She keeps her belongings attached to her at all times. Photo by Ekevara Kitpowsong, whose solo exhibit, City People, is on view now through July 31 at Modern Times Bookstore Collective in San Francisco. Profits from the sale of the images will be donated to The Gubbio Project.

- by Denise Sullivan

There are at present count over 6,000 people (and likely closer to 10,000) living outdoors, on the streets of San Francisco. They live in tent cities, in Golden Gate Park, in doorways on Market Street, in alleys in the Mission, on cardboard beds in the Haight, on patches of grass at Civic Center, in vehicles, and on benches at the beach. But the unhoused are under siege here as unaffordable housing, lack of services, and police violence continue to surge. The war against the homeless shows little sign of abating given the housing and eviction crisis: The murder of Luis Gongora by SFPD in April continues to shock and horrify with the recent revelations following his autopsy. And yet the city's technocrats and elites cleave to the idea that it's their freedoms which are being impinged upon; the sight of people living on the street is quite simply intolerable to them, though there may be a tiny crack of light in the darkness this week as Bay Area media launches an unprecedented barrage of coverage on all matters of homelessness.



The Beyond Homelessness Project began on Sunday and culminates today with over 70 Bay Area print, online, and radio outlets pledging to coordinate and intensify coverage of our beautiful and prosperous city's longstanding and growing unaffordability and its consequences. It's a baby step toward redirecting the narrative which so far, the organizer of the blitz, The San Francisco Chronicle, has either ignored or gotten terribly wrong. Failing to humanize our neighbors on the street, neglecting to report on a regular basis that around 70 percent of the people living homeless in San Francisco are displaced San Franciscans, and adhering to an editorial policy that reflects the opinions of, well, no one I know, the paper's editor-in-chief, Audrey Cooper, deigned it was time to begin more meaningful coverage on the subject of people living outdoors. Why? Because one day on her way to work she caught sight of a homeless couple having sex in their tent and it was simply too much for her to bear.

Though there has been a reporter charged with reporting on the homeless population, too often his pieces with intent to foster compassion end up doing the opposite, reinforcing ideas that longtime and new San Franciscans already hold. So when the reporter asks what may be a rhetorical question, like just when did San Francisco's streets become an "'open-air mental ward,'" I would argue the answer should be as sharp as the question. More than the result of budget cutting and law and order policies enacted in the Reagan era, the closing of mental health institutions and turning out people with no visible means of support much less the wherewithal to navigate the outside world, was the result of stone cold ticking off points on the far right's agenda. It needs to be said. And said again. So every potential voter gets the memorandum.

Here's a song Peter Case wrote 30 years about that period of time here and one San Franciscan impacted by poor federal, state, and local policy:



Over three and a half decades, San Francisco's mayors have struggled with a situation that veers from intractable to incomprehensible to potentially ripe for reform. Mayor Ed Lee's tepid assertions sound ridiculous on paper, though public outcry and pressure from the Board of Supervisors has resulted in the opening of homeless "navigation centers" and the promise of more. Meanwhile, he continues to order violent sweeps of encampments and tent cities, and police issue citations that the cited simply cannot pay, thereby criminalizing them. These so-called solutions rest uneasily side by side on the Bowery by the Bay.

Faith-based organizations carry a huge burden in caring for the downtrodden and dispossessed and yet they are increasingly marginalized and suspect themselves in secular society. Here in San Francisco the voices of religious leaders have been all but drown out and even their properties are being taken away from them. Nevertheless, the faithful continue to offer needed services like hot meals and shelter beds when the city falls short. This week the Rev. Cecil Williams, founder of Glide, one of the city's biggest providers of services wrote an editorial in which he declared homelessness a man-made disaster, a fault in the social contract. Glide is located in the Tenderloin where there is a longstanding tradition of non-violent street crime and social services, much like LA's Skid Row. The tech sector, though new to the neighborhood, believe its low-income neighbors have got to go, but there are those still working on the compassionate, innovative, and analog side of life, forging solutions that work there.

The Gubbio Project holds space for "sacred sleep" at St. Boniface church during daytime hours, allowing for the kind of rest that can prevent the psychosis-like symptoms caused by just one night of sleep deprivation. The Street Sheet published by the Coalition on Homelessness since 1989 and still publishing, provides news, information, and income to the people who sell it. Lave Mae is a mobile shower and toilet service with regular weekday stops. Based on the food truck model of doing business on wheels, the program is working.

And just to prove technology is not entirely at the root of all evil, there is at least one female-led company using its resources-- venture capital money and technological know how-- to actually do good for those we used to call street people. HandUp is an app that enables non-profits to raise money through online donations which support people in need directly. I learned about the service through one of their clients, a woman I pass with some regularity on the street. We speak from time to time, and eventually I asked if I could quote her for the purpose of this story. She asked me how she could tell if I was going to exploit her and I told her I guess she would just have to trust me on that. We both had a good laugh at my claim as I was making it, then talked further about our mutual missing teeth and left it at that (when I went back to follow-up with her, she had moved on). HandUp is working for her and until somebody tells me reason to believe otherwise, it sounds like it's a good stop gap while programs and services to fully care for the unhoused continue to develop and the digital divide closes. Personally, I liked finding out that the start-up's co-founder had a background that included working with Food Not Bombs, a meal program fairly active and supported by my friends and organizers during the punk rock-era and still holding strong (not coincidentally, the present storm of local media coverage has concerned a number of former punk musicians now in their 50s and 60s who are struggling on the street or who have perished, like Miss Kay from Polkacide did).

And just so you don't think I'm completely hardened to the ways of humankind, there are evermore good people working to make change in whatever ways they can: Earlier this year a public works employee refused to take part in a violent tear down of a make-shift abode. I don't know what happened to the worker, but I hope she retained her job. Sure it was one person, or in the case of HandUp, a few helping other people. But as far as I can tell, this is how functioning society is supposed to work, in lieu of its leaders or institutions doing anything about anything.

I work for a community-minded bookstore located in a neighborhood at the crossroads of gentrification and hard-hit. There is a men's shelter at the end of the block and sometimes the weary take a load off in our establishment. While it's true that the presence of mentally unstable, intoxicated, and unwashed San Franciscans may detract from the store's business, we choose to consciously engage (and disengage when necessary) with our neighbors. It takes time, effort, and admittedly we've had some difficulties but as you might imagine, people treated humanely respond in kind. The store has historically hired and served the activists and artists at the center of the movement for housing, economic and racial justice, many of them authors themselves: We are constantly learning from them how to better work for justice in an unjust town.

Among the city's most tireless advocates for decriminalizing poverty is the writer and spoken word performer Lisa Gray-Garcia, better known as Tiny. The activist, educator, and author combines street protest, poetry, and ancient ritual into a vision that suggests we transform the way we see, hear, and speak of our fellows. Divestment from the language of the oppressor is a tool that's been used by marginalized communities throughout history, and Tiny knows well how to work with words. Her terms like gentrifuckation put a fine point on exactly what's happening here. Her vision employs a complete overhaul of business as usual, the kind of change that moves from the bottom up and the inside out, the kind of work that begins at home. Gray-Garcia, her co-workers, and collaborators have either experienced living unhoused or know someone who has. They've confronted the grind of street survival and police brutality firsthand, and lived to tell the tales, and to help others along the way. Instead of homeless, they see people as "unhoused" but working toward "homefulness."

Though it's nice the Chronicle is finally getting up to speed on the idea that all of us who call San Francisco home are San Franciscans, it won't be until the unhoused become homeful and we can see and hear what those who have been there really have to say that the rest of us can truly say we that we too have moved beyond homelessness.




Denise Sullivan is the author of Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip Hop. She writes from San Francisco on gentrification and the arts.

Push To Fire Chief of SFPD Continues As Hunger Strike Enters Day 15

Three of the Frisco5, Ike Pinkston, Maria Cristina Gutierrez and Edwin Lindo as they approach San Francisco's City Hall flanked by supporters

- by Denise Sullivan

"We won," said Maria Cristina Gutierrez, from the steps of San Francisco's city hall on Tuesday afternoon. Gutierrez, her fellow hunger strikers, the Frisco 5 (Ilyich "Equipto" Sato, Sellassie Blackwell, Ike Pinkston, and Edwin Lindo) and nearly one thousand fellow San Franciscans embarked on a march to Mayor Ed Lee's office to demand the firing of police Chief Greg Suhr, leader of a department rife with racism and responsible for the executions of four San Franciscans in two years. Though the mayor, who had been made aware of the march, was at a meeting across town, the Frisco 5 and their followers proceeded to the Board of Supervisors meeting where they used public comment to demand their elected officials stand with them and resolve to fire the chief.

"This is the beginning of the struggle on so many fronts," asserted Gutierrez at the end of a long day of protest and nearly the end of the second week of starvation in the name of ending police violence and the long arm of over-gentrification. Citing the efforts by Gandhi and Cesar Chavez, Gutierrez says she was moved to hunger strike following the death of Luis Gongora, an immigrant from Yucatan who recently lost his housing and was living homeless on Shotwell Street until he was shot 11 times for allegedly brandishing a knife. Witness accounts of the killing varied widely though one certainty is that once again, it doesn't look good for SFPD who in a two-year period killed four men. Alex Nieto in March of 2014 was shot 59 times when police mistook his taser (he was employed as a security guard) for a gun.  Not quite one year later, Guatemalan immigrant Amilcar Perez-Lopez was shot six times in the back. Mario Woods was shot 20 times in December and the incident was caught on video in its entirety. The April 7 shooting of Góngora was the event that prompted Gutierrez to say, "No more," taking matters into her own hands.

A native of Colombia and a San Francisco resident for over 40 years, Gutierrez is the executive director of the Compañeros del Barrio pre-school in the Mission District. When it was announced she would wage a hunger strike, her son, Equipto, a teacher at the school, vowed to join her. Last year, Equipto a hip hop recording artist, became involved in the cause to oust Mayor Lee somewhat accidentally when a run-in caught on video caused him to declare the mayor "a disgrace to Asian people." On Tuesday, Equipto's father Art Sato, known to the Bay Area as a jazz DJ on Pacifica radio station KPFA, stood on the steps of City Hall, and extolled a bit on Equipto's political education. Born in a concentration camp during World War II, Sato also referred to Lee's term as a "disgrace," and the SFPD texting scandal involving Asian officers, while underscoring the importance of Asians becoming involved in the fight for racial justice. He noted that Asians 4 Black Lives were holding things down at 17th and Valencia in the protesters absence. Sato who said he is normally a very reserved and private person added, "This strike has taught me a lot. To be a little less private, and to express my pride for my son."

Also in attendance were Refugio and Elvira Nieto, parents of Alex Nieto, who just weeks after a judgment clearing the officers who killed their son, are still on the frontlines for justice. Gwendolyn Woods, mother of Mario Woods, was there; she awaits the results of the Department of Justice's probe into her son's death at the hands of SFPD, while the officers who shot Woods immediately returned to their jobs. Overseeing the proceedings on the steps of City Hall comedian and activist Yayne Abeba passed the mic to singers and activists, including poet Tony Robles who read his piece, "It Took A Hunger Strike." Speaker Larry Dorsey poked holes in the idea of the Bay Area as a progressive bastion. "San Francisco is so racist, it thinks that racism doesn't exist," he said.

"People say San Francisco isn't Ferguson, it's not Baltimore. It's not. It's worse," hunger striker Edwin Lindo told AJ+ last week. The police violence that sparked uprisings in those cities were based on years of police abuse culminating in the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray but here in San Francisco, the high profile cases of the last two years, are fairly damning evidence that time for police reform is long overdue. Lindo who intends to run for the District 9 seat on the Board to be vacated by David Campos in the fall told me it was the book The Radical King by Dr. Cornel West that inspired him to join the hunger strikers. Ike Pinkston, who works at the school with Gutierrez, is also a friend of Equipto's as is hip hop artist Sellassie. All of the Frisco 5 have been aided by close friends, family, and community members during their fight, which at this point in addition to seeing the firing of Chief Suhr is about staying alive. Volunteer student medics from UCSF, have been attending to the hunger strikers though were not at liberty to disclose information about their health. However one of the medics assured me that though everyone is concerned about the well-being of the protesters, they are being closely monitored and hydration is of top concern. For nearly two weeks now, the strikers have subsisted on a liquid diet of water, coconut water, broth, and ginger tea. (By Wednesday afternoon, Bay Area journalist Davey D broke the news that Blackwell had been taken to UCSF medical center; he has since returned to the occupation at SFPD's Mission Station).

"I don't want to die. I want to go home, eat some good food… " said Gutierrez, pausing at the thought of food. "We have to be willing to give our lives to this, for our children," she said. Inspired by the sight of so many Black and Brown faces working in solidarity, she said she would proudly wear her new nickname "Mama" of the movement for police reform. "They will never divide us again."

DJ Art Sato, father of hunger striker Ilyich "Equipto" Sato, speaks in defense of his son and Asians 4 Black Lives and against Mayor Ed Lee

Update

As of Friday afternoon, the Frisco 5 were hospitalized so their weakened conditions could be more closely monitored.

By evening a group of citizens dubbed the Frisco 500 had occupied City Hall, chanting their one demand, to fire Chief Suhr. By 10 PM, the sheriff's department and riot police began to forcibly clear journalists and protesters from the building, resulting in arrests and injuries in the double digits. Organizers of the movement to end police violence have called for a general strike in the City of San Francisco on Monday, May 9.


Denise Sullivan is the author of Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip Hop. She writes from San Francisco on gentrification and the arts.

Gentrification And Racial Injustice... In Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco

Dear (White) Liberal San Franciscan,

- by Denise Sullivan

I regret to inform, you missed it: The final day of celebration for the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church on Fillmore Street was Sunday. Aside from its usual meditation on "A Love Supreme" and a service to deliver the wisdom in its creator's words, there was even a bit of time that day reserved to remember Prince, a kindred spirit and sound messenger of love who transitioned last Thursday. But really, there is no need to cry for the Coltrane Church: Going strong for nearly 50 years, it will continue to thrive in one incarnation or another, in accordance to its creed proclaiming life everlasting. Armed with a faith that knows no bounds, no building is going to hold down Archbishop Franzo King and his congregation. He and his musically gifted family of ordained ministers will remain in the light of Coltrane consciousness and on the move for truth and justice. However, if you'd still like to grieve our losses, please consider the sorry state of San Francisco, and our complicity in the soul murder of the city the Church calls home.

Once dubbed Harlem of the West, christened the Fillmore Jazz District, and finally subtitled "The Heart and Soul of the City," with the exit of the internationally known destination for Coltrane fans and jazz pilgrims, so goes the last living breathing expression of Black culture on the street. When the people who make the neighborhood leave the neighborhood, we are all poorer for it. I know you know this because I've seen your passion, particularly at the rallies to support anti-displacement in the once-predominantly Latino Mission District. But as we continue to lose more and more of our friends, family, and neighbors to displacement, illness, unemployment, police violence and other consequences of over-gentrification, it would help if those of us who remain in opposition to these forces move as one body and one voice against the evil that has taken up residence here.

I mention your participation in regard to the Black communities specifically because over the past two years, when it came time to stand up for another cultural and community-serving institution in the neighborhood, America's oldest Black bookstore, Marcus Books (housed in a regal purple building that was also once home to the historic jazz club, Jimbo's Bop City), y'all may as well have been whistling Dixie. I know you have your reasons: Small businesses are supposed to be self-supporting. But in a city that is hostile to its working class residents, people of color, and the neighborhood businesses serving them, it's not that easy. There is not what we call a Twitter tax-break for sole-proprietorships. Small business is at the mercy of real estate speculators, and banks that set customers on a lending track that leads to foreclosure instead of away from it. There is no rent control on commercial space according to state law.  Add to that a customer base caught between cheaper prices online and three jobs that don't allow for leisure-time browsing and you've got a crisis. Just look at all the empty storefronts in the Haight, the Tenderloin, and even in (gasp) Noe Valley. In the Mission, the difficulties are far from over: Longtime businesses struggle to remain open; mysterious fires are all too common and police violence escalates. There is, perhaps as you've heard, a hunger for justice. A hunger strike, now on its seventh day, is occupying the area around the police station. At a rally organized by peace and justice workers calling for the firing of the chief of police and the mayor, a speaker asked, "Where are the Democrats?" She had a point, I thought, looking around for my peers. The Black and Brown communities however are working in solidarity: Last month they tied the knot in a symbolic ceremony conducted by Archbishop King.

Archbishop Franzo King, Mother Reverend Marina King, Deacon Marlee-I Mystic and Reverend Wanika King Stephens

The Kings of the Coltrane Church are simply too kind to use their spirituality as a weapon or to shame people into action, but I'm not that evolved and so I will. Perhaps you are holding back in supporting the cause for racial justice because you are not a joiner; you don't do street protest, you gave at the office. In the case of supporting a place like the Coltrane Church, maybe you opted out because you are an atheist, a non-sectarian, or wish to hold the line of separation between church and state. Maybe you're solid in your chosen faith, or otherwise committed on Sundays. I understand. Though surely the reason you resisted can't be that the Coltrane Church venerates a saint and a Holy Trinity that is rendered Black in its iconography-- I know you are way too open-minded to let pictures stand in the path between yourself and a higher purpose. So what is it?

The Archbishop and his family share a surname with the greatest, freedom fighting, God-loving American this country has ever produced, the one who connected the dots between racism, poverty and war, and the moral imperative to end them. But because you are a liberal San Franciscan, there is probably no need to invoke the memory of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement or to mention the people of faith embedded in it, who worked alongside students and a broad spectrum of allies on the grassroots and political sides to end segregation, then went on to contribute to the ending of the war. Some of these same people forged women's rights, gay liberation, well, you get the picture…You were in their midst or read about them in books. So why am I telling you this? I'm getting to it.

Certainly poverty and racism have never ended, and other wars have come and gone, but the political war in the Fillmore has raged on, unabated. Why? That is for people better equipped than I am to uncover, though the neighborhood's well-known history of oppression is a backdoor to understanding its sustained troubles. First settled by Jewish immigrants following the 1906 earthquake, Japanese settlers came next, but were interned during World War II. The next wave of migrants were working African Americans in the '40s and '50s. The razing of their homes began in earnest in the '60s. The decades of ousting residents from the area continued into the 21st Century even after the so-called Redevelopment Agency, a well-documented program of disaster  from top to bottom, was retired in 2014. Its effects are still being played out in the current rent strike at the Midtown complex and in the eviction case of 99-year-old Iris Canada, to name but two examples.

We know San Francisco has housing issues, but the details of the buildings ceded to the Fillmore as community benefits during and post-Redevelopment seem to have their own special circumstances that are not easily understood by people who live outside the community. Some would say it is not our business. Names are occasionally called, but inquiries are usually relegated to insular meetings of neighborhood councils, and overruled by a couple of pairs of iron hands. But what if the truth were to be discovered and prevailed? Chances are, the Coltrane Church's mission would not have been interrupted, nor would its space be contested, nor would the lives of all the folks who've been pushed from their neighborhood at center of the City, to the outer limits and beyond it be disrupted to this day. Who specifically is gaining when the Fillmore's cultural resources are repeatedly displaced?

Having a community's cultural cachet, its attractions, and its gathering places-- in this case its bookstore and jazz church-- moved out is tragic for all the reasons you can imagine. Jazz clubs Rasselas and Yoshi's are gone: With the absence of the Coltrane Church, the Fillmore is left particularly bereft. This Black community's cultural assets are no longer so readily accessed and all benefits to the communities exposed to them are suddenly ceased.

When a neighborhood corridor's artifacts and active existence disappears, only to be presented  encased in the steel and glass institutions of downtown and civic center (where the needs of the organizations there must comply to more monied, bureaucratic, and middle of the road interests) or get annexed to the Bay View (also battling gentrification), Black music and art and literature in the making cannot just be happened upon, discovered, or shared with neighbors spontaneously. Advance tickets are required, the cost may often be prohibitive, and the experience is mediated, with conditions attached. The revolution has been institutionalized. And yet Black culture, often born from pain and designed to transcend it, could and should be our greatest ally and friend right now. It is after all, America's great export, to use the crass language of commodification. I also realize describing a canon of arts so diverse and magnificent it cannot be cataloged, contained, or quantified with such a tiny brush stroke is my folly. What I mean to say is, here in San Francisco, Black Culture has become a destination rather than an integrated part of our cultural existence. We have become the mono culture we feared, much like the places you fled from, and the fault is ours to bear. We can no longer stand by and point the finger at Ed Lee, Ron Conway, Chief Suhr, Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Chronicle, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, or any other villain du jour, as inept as they are and as easy as it might be. We the people of San Francisco need to take responsibility for this blessed mess.

We need to make room for inspiration and improvisation again; we need to live more of a jazz existence and less like squares or risk diving deeper into the jazz-free zone. We're already enveloped by "hipsters" who not only appropriated jazz words and clothes, but wouldn't know hip if it hit them upside the head, ya dig? We need to show them how it's done, San Francisco-style and we need everyone, Black and Brown, LGBTQ, Asian, Native, seniors, women, youth, homeless people, and yes, straight white men too (though we could use you to turn down the volume on yourselves). If you just moved here and work for a tech company and feel what you're reading, we need you, too. The City of St. Francis has always welcomed you, but it needs you to become an active participant in the lifestyles and values we prize.

For going on 50 years, the Coltrane Church has been there, to feed and cloth and tend to the spiritual and musical needs of San Franciscans. If ever you've traveled by car across town on a Tuesday afternoon or found yourself with time to listen to KPOO 89.5, and got lost in the notes from John Coltrane's saxophone or the voice of Sister Wanika, speaking his words and wisdom, then you know. Or if ever you've attended an event against police violence or during the banking and foreclosure crisis, you've heard Archbishop King speak. These are the ways in which the Church of St. John Coltrane has been woven into the fabric of our everyday lives and benefited all San Franciscans. They are examples of our best selves, moving in harmony in the name and sound of truth, justice, and love. This is Coltrane consciousness in action, attempting to better the conditions of the world around us.

"I know there are bad forces, forces out there that bring suffering and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force, I want to be the force which is truly for good," said John Coltrane.

People of conscience cannot and will not let the bad forces that have descended on us here prevail. Grieve if you must, but there is no better time than now to get involved in the movement for racial and economic justice. Now is the time to stand up and become a force for good, for the benefit of all San Franciscans.



Denise Sullivan is the author of Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music from Blues to Hip Hop. She writes from San Francisco on gentrification issues and the arts.