At a meeting with Mission nonprofit and organization leaders on Friday, Mayor Ed Lee said he did not have the $7 million they requested immediately available, but promised to continue a dialogue and pursue additional resources that could be made available to address their concerns about gentrification and displacement.
The groups held a press conference last week denouncing Mayor Ed Lee’s inaction on issues affecting Latino communities.
The tone at Friday’s meeting was respectful, but insistent, as the organizations reminded the mayor of their request for $7 million to help alleviate the effects of rising living costs on low income families.
At the end of the meeting, the $7 million question was posed again. “You didn’t tell us that you were going to respond affirmatively to the to the $7 million ask,” said Melba Maldonado, who runs La Raza Community Resource Center.
But that’s easier said than done. Millions are not so easily dispensed, the Mayor said.
“I don’t sit on money. I have to work in concert with the Board” Lee said. “This is not my spending playground.”
Still, he reiterated his dedication to addressing family homelessness and his dismay at displacement.
“I don’t have $7 million, but I will commit to continue working with you all to identifying additional resources,” Lee said.
Homelessness, violence prevention, and displacement
Earlier in the meeting, Lee also pointed to the minimum wage increase to $13 an hour that took effect today, and the city’s plans to implement paid family leave for workers, as steps the city has taken toward assisting low income working families.
“We’ve got good foundations in a number of areas and I want to recognize that,” Lee said. “I want every eviction to be prevented. I want every fire prevented. I want greed not to be the backdrop of what’s happening in the Mission,” Lee said.
But nonprofit leaders were unconvinced that the city is doing enough to support those hit the hardest by gentrification in the Mission in particular.
“We consider ourselves to be your allies…but…there didn’t seem to be the level of response that we sought in a partnership,” said Sam Ruiz, executive director of the Mission Neighborhood Resource Centers.
Mario Paz, the executive director of Good Samaritan Family Resource Center, told a story about a staff member finding a woman with her child washing her family’s laundry in the bathroom sink after hours, embarrassed by the fact that she was homeless and living in her car. Though the Mayor’s office presented an enumerated list of spending on support for families, children, youth, and education, Paz said families remain in crisis.
“The $626,000 [allocated to family resource centers in future budgets], it helps, but it’s not enough,” Paz told Lee. “And this is hard. It weighs on you.”
Though he didn’t give details, Lee said his administration is hoping to reveal a “pretty solid response to family homelessness in the future.”
Myrna Melgar, who runs the Jamestown Community Center and sits on various city advisory boards and commissions, also asked for more preventive approaches to addressing the effects of income disparities, rather than reactive ones. She said many families previously served by Mission organizations now live in the Bayview, where service infrastructure was already insufficient to support existing low income communities.
“Not only do we need the support we’ve always had…we need new infrastructure, in the new neighborhoods where families are,” Melgar said. “We need a comprehensive plan to mitigate the displacement.”
Lee said he had been working to address some concerns via the city’s budget. He also noted a number of allocations to Mission services in the 2015-16 fiscal year budget, including $1.8 million to the Roadmap to Peace violence prevention initiative, $12.6 million allocated to Mission service providers through various city departments, and $227.5 million toward the construction of affordable housing in the Mission.
“Just because we hadn’t met, doesn’t mean we weren’t doing work in the budget,” he said. “Nothing has stopped.”
Some still felt left out of the process.
“I keep hearing the door is open, but nobody knows where it is,” said Marilyn Duran, a youth organizer with the activist group PODER. “You need to come through our door.”
Lee agreed to meet again with the organizers soon, possibly within a month, and said he would consider coming to the Mission to have the meeting rather than holding it at City Hall.
I’m glad they are holding his feet to the fire.
The people at the table with the mayor are grassroots community leaders.
W”hose tax money?? People in the Mission pay taxes, too. Most of them have been there a long time.
Is there any outcomes based evidence that this is money well spent?
Do any of these people live in the neighborhood they purport to represent?
Must be nice to come to a country and demand handouts to keep your hood pure.
“Millions are not so easily dispensed, the Mayor said.”
Unless you’re Twitter, blackmailing the city for our tax money. (3+ more years…)
GIVE US, GIVE US, GIVE US……