It turns out that the mayor is important.
As San Franciscans begin to take a closer look at the 16 candidates running for the position, Mission Loc@l looked back at former administrations to see if mayors really affect policy at the neighborhood level. As it happens, they do.
Prominent issues in the Mission include immigration, development, access to health care and housing. As former mayor Gavin Newsom, and to some extent current mayor Ed Lee, have demonstrated, mayors can have a major influence in all these areas.
Three of Newsom’s policy decisions had particularly significant impacts on the Mission: to have the Juvenile Probation Department report undocumented juveniles who were arrested on suspicion of committing a felony to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to push Healthy San Francisco and to institute Care Not Cash.
Newsom’s decision in July 2008 to have undocumented youths referred to ICE as soon as they were arrested on a felony charge was particularly controversial, and it took three years’ worth of lobbying to shield juveniles with family in the Bay Area until they are convicted of a felony charge.
The Board of Supervisors, led by District 9 Supervisor David Campos, passed an ordinance in November 2009 calling on law enforcement to turn over undocumented juveniles to ICE only after a judge had upheld a felony charge, but Newsom never implemented it.
Newsom’s policy meant that approximately 150 youths were released to ICE 179 times.
In May, Lee chose to implement a portion of Campos’ ordinance, asking the Juvenile Probation Department to shield juveniles arrested on felony charges if they were accompanied minors with family in the Bay Area.
Since the change, the Juvenile Probation Department has released only five juveniles to ICE, and all five had either been reported previously and released to ICE or adjudicated on a felony. This August was the first month since July 2008 that no youths were released to ICE, said William Siffermann, the Juvenile Probation Department’s chief probation officer.
Under the policy of reporting juveniles to ICE, the Juvenile Probation Department has seen a significant reduction in the number of unaccompanied minors involved in the distribution of drugs in San Francisco.
“Once the department started taking a stance that involved reporting undocumented youth detained on felony charges, the number of felony arrests went down,” Siffermann said.
Another Newsom initiative, Healthy San Francisco, has disproportionately benefited the Mission District. The Healthy San Francisco 2009-2010 report estimated that of 60,000 uninsured adult residents in San Francisco, more than 53,400 were enrolled in the program in 2010. Of those, 5,860, or 11 percent, were from the Mission District. Only the Excelsior had a higher enrollment, with 7,772 participants or 14.5 percent of the program.
According to the report, the number of uninsured adults in Healthy San Francisco rose 24 percent from 2009, and expenditures totaled $163.9 million.
Newsom also focused on making an environmental impact, and in 2009 he initiated an ordinance that mandated recycling and composting, with the goal of diverting 75 percent of the city’s waste from landfills by 2010 and 100 percent by 2020. By 2010, San Francisco had hit a 77 percent diversion rate.
Newsom attempted to tackle homelessness with his Care Not Cash policy, which he authored while on the Board of Supervisors and put into effect as mayor in 2004. The program reduces the amount of direct cash aid that homeless people receive from County Adult Assistance Programs (CAAP), in exchange for housing or shelter and other services.
The Human Services Agency’s monthly statistical report found that the number of homeless CAAP recipients decreased following the implementation of Care Not Cash, from 2,497 in April 2004 to 509 in August of this year. A total of 3,623 homeless CAAP clients have moved into housing since Care Not Cash was enacted.
But Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said that instead of creating new housing, Care Not Cash has displaced homeless people who cannot qualify for the program because they receive other benefits or are undocumented, an issue she claims directly impacts the homeless population in the Mission.
“For the people who get into the housing, of course it’s great,” Friedenbach said. “But for those who can’t qualify for Care Not Cash, their housing options were diminished greatly because the housing is being set aside for one population.”
Care Not Cash also allows shelters to be considered as housing, so once a Care Not Cash recipient finds a bed in a shelter, he or she will receive the reduced cash aid from CAAP. A proposed ballot measure to prohibit a bed in a homeless shelter from counting as housing under Care Not Cash was initially promoted by District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim, but she withdrew her support from the measure in July.
Newsom also targeted the homeless with his support of the Sit-Lie ordinance, a ballot measure that passed last November making it illegal for someone to sit or lie down on sidewalks between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. Through the end of August, the police department had issued 167 citations and 1,164 warnings for Sit-Lie violations.
Though the measure has not been widely enforced throughout the city, Friedenbach worried about the power the ordinance gives police.
“They have this law they can use when they want. It’s a huge club in their hands to put people down, and we don’t know when and who they are going to use it against.”
Homelessness is one of the issues that political consultant Jim Ross, who ran Newsom’s first campaign, believes the candidates in the upcoming mayoral election must address. Ross has a theory that everybody in San Francisco shares four stories — that somehow homelessness, parking issues, housing and an unreliable MUNI system impact them.
These issues have been on San Franciscans’ minds for a while, but until they’re resolved, Ross sees them as remaining at the forefront of voters’ minds.
“I don’t think anyone running for mayor has solutions to all these problems,” Ross said. “But if they ignore these issues, they ignore them at their own peril. The next mayor will have to take on these issues.”
