Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth
Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline
Diane Spaulding
Diane Spaulding is executive director of the Non Profit Housing Association of Northern California, an affordable housing trade association with 550 members that has been in operation for 25 years. NPH has two counter-parts in California one in the Los Angeles area and the other in San Diego. There is also a fourth organization that represents affordable housing providers in rural areas of the state. NPH operates in the nine counties that comprise the Bay Area. This is a metro-region wit a high concentration of affordable housing providers in the urban cores of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
Interview
Steve Lerner (SDL): What constituency does NPH serve?
Diane Spaulding (DS): Our focal group is the non-profit housing developers although recently more and more for-profit developers are doing affordable housing. That has been true in other parts of California as well but in the north the non-profit sector has always dominated. Non-profit [affordable housing providers] usually produce over 60 percent of all the multi-family rental housing in our region. But more and more for profits are getting involved so there is tension. We have for the first time a for profit affordable housing developer on our board. Her name is Sharmain Curtis and she is the president of A.F. Evans. She started at Mercy Housing and used to work for Jane Graff years ago. Almost ten years ago, she did a tax credit project in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, which was a joint venture with Chinatown community development corporation. At the time it was the largest tax credit project with a budget of $35 million. So for-profit affordable housing developers are doing a lot of very good stuff and this has created tension with the non-profit developers. In addition to the developers we have members of NPH who are government members, social service providers, supportive housing providers, homeless advocates, attorneys, planners, and environmental design architects. All are part of the organization and as a result we get to work with great people like Michael Pyatok [the Oakland architect who does design workshops in low-income communities.]. Because we are the non-profit housing association the advocacy work, policy development, professional development training, and technical assistance we provide tends to be targeted towards the non-profit housing developers. In our 25 year history we have had four phases. We are co-located with the Local Initiatives Support Coalition (LISC). Twenty-five years ago they didn't exist. The Corporation for Supportive Housing didn't exist. There are only a handful of CDCs or Housing Development Corporations that are over 25 years old but most aren't. So in that early phase we produced the manual that taught people how to organize themselves to do non-profit affordable housing development. We were the Technical Assistance provider to this growing group of non-profit affordable housing developers. We were volunteer based. We were the how-to people. We were the place to go to learn how to set up a non-profit housing development group. In our second phase, in the 1980s we were involved in lobbying for the National Affordable Housing ACT, the McKinney (sp?) Homeless Assistance Act, and a series of bonds at the state level that were passed that created the state sources of funding for affordable housing. We also worked with Alan Cranston on the Cranston-Gonzales Act. The third phase began in the 1990s when we started to develop what we call "member services" in response to requests from our membership. For example, we launched a fellowship program for people of color. This initiative started because most of our developers were white but they were developing housing in low-income areas that were often communities of color. So we created a fellowship program and raised funds for it privately. Over a four year period we trained 12 young people of color to become project managers, two of whom are now executive directors of CDCs. We also developed a national expertise on affordable housing and people call us from all over the country about "not-in my-back-yard"(NIMBYism) because we were hearing from our members that next to the challenge of finding financing to put these deals together, the issue of community opposition was the number two barrier to the development of housing in the 1990s. We did a study in collaboration with a master student at UC Berkeley who collected housing development data from our developers from 1994 to 1998 about how many units they built. At the same time we asked them to tell us their NIMBY horror stories. In the process we got data on how NIMBY battles affected their development time lines. In one instance A NIMBY fight prolonged the time line as long as 18 months. And we collected data on what it did to their budget.
SDL: That happened in Parkview Commons, didn't it?
DS: That was a homeownership project. Parkview was bad [as NIMBY stories go] but there were other projects that subsequently would just blow your mind. So we hired someone who was with us for seven years who is now teaching law school, a guy who was an attorney who had a passion for fair housing issues and land use law. He developed this "tool box" initiative that includes tools developers and community leaders can use for "community acceptance strategies planning." It helps them anticipate opposition and employ a planning process to mitigate (and in many cases prevent) the opposition from coalescing. The tool box includes some videos on this subject. We learned that there are many stereotypical images people have of who lives in affordable housing and who gets it and what does to adjacent property values, ass well as what happens to crime rates in the neighborhood where the affordable housing is built. We published fact sheets that show that affordable housing doesn't lower property values; and how affordable housing relates to crimes. People also think there will be all this traffic and an increase in cars in their neighborhood if affordable housing is built so we have a computer program that developers can use to try to get the parking ration lowered. We developed this whole body of work around community acceptance. The lawyer who worked with us on this is Tim Iglasias and now he teaches law school at the University of California at San Francisco. He is a Jesuit. I have his telephone number. He is truly an expert on the NIMBY phenomenon and what do you do and how to get around it. We also developed a service line so that our members can call us fro information and advice. Our fourth phase involves the fact that we have never lost sight of our advocacy roots. Last year California passed Proposition 46, the $2.1 billion affordable housing bond, the largest in the history of the country. I worked on that for five years with Senator Burton. Once a week I was in Sacramento. We were fortunate in that Carol Migden (sp?) an assemblywoman who was chair of Appropriations, Sen. Burton, Willy Brown, and some powerful people in the north and we got it through the legislature. We had to get two thirds vote, which in the California state legislature requires a miracle. We took it to the state's voters. We needed 50 percent [of the vote] plus one [voter] and we got almost 57.5 percent state wide. It was a referendum. In the Bay Area and in our counties here in San Francisco we got the largest, we got 74 percent of the vote. So we have not lost sight of the fact that housing advocacy and organizing really does work. If you were to ask our membership why they pay NPH dues they will say: because NPH is my eyes and ears, watchdog, and advocate. Community Development Corporations and Housing Development Corporations don't have time to pay attention to all the legislation and regulatory issues they have to deal with. They rely on us for that. We are their voice and we try to be their voice to the extent that we can in Washington, DC as well as in Sacramento. We are active in the National Open Housing Coalition, in the National Housing Conference, and the National Builders Museum in Washington is going to be doing an affordable housing that will use our video. We recognize that having really good data can fuel our policy agenda. Two years ago we did some special fundraising and we were able to hire a staff person. In California we have this goofy thing called Housing Element Law and it is part of our general planning process. It is goofy because the state requires every city and county to develop a Housing Element which includes a site inventory. They have to say here is how we are going to plan for and accommodate the housing needs of all of our residents including those of the very lowest income. The goofy part is that there is absolutely no enforcement mechanism so many of these jurisdictions never finish their plan and nothing happens to them. And if they never build the housing they have identified as needed in their plan nothing happens to them. We advertised the fact that the clock ticking in our region and that all of our 109 cities in our nine counties had to file their Housing Element plan with the state of CA and have them certified by the end of December 2001. We decided to see what a little citizen pressure would do. We picked the top 40 fastest growing of the 109 cities to target and we worked in all those communities. We talked to the League of Conservation Voters, the Board of Realtors, the Faith based organizations, and we pulled together a group in all those locations and they read their Housing Element law and graded their city on how it was living up to the law. Then we published the Housing Crisis Report Card. It turned out that 76 percent of the cities were failing miserably. We did a huge organizing campaign around that fact and tracked how they were doing. By June, 2002, only 11 percent of our jurisdictions were in compliance with their Housing Element Law. Now it is up to 55 percent. But they were supposed to be in compliance by December 2001. So it is really kind of pathetic. We got coverage in all the major newspapers. We had City Councils calling us and saying: "Oh my God. You gave us a failing grade." And they would say: "We are trying to do the right thing." And yet they have all these policies in place that are completely ignoredSo it has fueled an effort at the state level and a renewed interest in putting teeth in our Housing Element Law.
SDL: Wasn't there someone in the legislature who made noise about withholding transportation dollars to communities that didn't comply with the Housing Element Law?
DS: Yes that was Derrell Steinberg. We have been working with him on AB #680. And then he had a bill in the last session I think it was AB #1221. He hasn't won yet but he addresses the fundamental problem posed by the fiscalization of land use in the state. A lot of our land use decisions and development patterns are influenced by the fact that cities and counties are fighting over sales tax revenue vs. property tax revenue. So you see all these giant big box retail developments going up all over the state because the jurisdictions want the sales tax revenue. And there is a total disincentive to produce housing or affordable housing because of all the additional public funding issues. He has floated a bill for the last three years and this last session he floated a demonstration project for the cities and county of Sacramento, that would have allowed them to swap and share their sales tax and their property tax to create a more equitably distributed revenue base. And there was an inclusionary housing proposition attached to it. Senator Dunn, the senator from Orange County who is the chair of the Housing Committee, offered a bill two years ago, SB 910, that would have withheld transportation funds and other infrastructure funding if a jurisdiction did not have a certified Housing Element that was in compliance. The League of Cities and the California Association of Counties went nuts over it. We supported that bill and heavily advocated for it but it didn't go anywhere. So finally the new chair of Senate Housing said there were all these housing bills that were going nowhere and organized a statewide group that is meeting under the auspices of the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD). I have a staff person on it and they are meeting all day once a month. They have the building industry associations on it, the League of Cities, non-profit advocates, for profit advocates, government and they are trying to hammer out a new system for providing incentives for housing production in the state and trying to get at the barriers [to producing affordable housing]and fundamental fiscal issues. If they can reach agreement I will be really surprised but they are trying.
SDL: Is this not all skewed by Prop 13?
DS: It is skewed by that and there is still talk about a split role that would separate commercial and residential [property taxation.]. Prop 13 limits the [property] tax to one percent. When a property is sold it triggers a reassessment of the property. For example, I own a home in San Francisco and my property taxes are based on the value of my home when we purchased it in 1988. I am taxed at one percent of the total assessed value as of 1988. Whereas my next door neighbors on both sides have owned their homes since 1924. One is 70 and the other is 90 years old. Their city property tax is based on the assessed value of their property since they bought their property in 1924. So I am paying $7 to 8,000 in taxes and Uri is paying $100. And that is happening all over California. There is another overlay to it and that is that commercial and residential real estate taxes in California are treated on a similar plain. There is talk about separating out commercial and residential and creating a different tax assessment system for both of them. Check out the website of the California Budget Project which is www.cbp.org. They has done some great research and had a conference on Prop 13 some 25 years later. The conference was on what Prop 13 really did and how bad it is.
SDL: One good thing about Prop 13, I imagine, is that with the value of Bay Area real estate going through the roof, Prop 13 keeps taxes artificially low for long-time homeowners who don't have a lot of money. That keeps them from being forced out of their homes because of an inability to pay the taxes.
DS: There is no question that's true.
SDL: Does the whole system of real estate taxation have to be changed?
DS: I think the system is pretty broken in California. On the housing front we know what we want. One of the sad things about California is that we were the first state in the country to create a state dedicated revenue source for housing: the California Housing Trust Fund. It was passed in 1987. Unfortunately, they screwed it up. The picked a revenue source that never came close to the income and revenue projections. It is based on tideland oil revenue and at present it produces about $2 million a year and that $2 million goes into the trust fund and never generates housing production at all. But the framework is there. California should elevate housing and basically considers it part of the infrastructure needs of our state -- like transportation and parks and open space. We are doing education around trying to get housing elevated [as a funding priority] and to get ta permanent dedicated revenue source funded.
SDL: From where?
DS: The reason we got the $2.1 billion in bonds [for affordable housing] is that we had a two pronged strategy. In 2000 the state had at $13-14 billion surplus. When we were in legislators offices we told them that housing was in crisis in California and we needed a regular source of housing funding we count on you. They said: we have all this money and we should pay as we go. So we could not get their support for a permanent source of funding. Instead, we got an almost $600 million appropriation out of general funds which was up from $30 million the last decade. So the next year we are back with the same message and they said: why don't you float a bond? So we were back to bonds. The last time we had done a housing bond in California was 1990. The bond is entirely for affordable housing. It is broken down by emergency shelter, supportive housing, farmworker housing, self-help housing They think they will spend it out over a five year period. There were three previous successful bonds in the state. In 1988 there were two and another in 1990. And three bonds totaled about $600 million. So we had a long dry spell which was when the advocacy took place. Then we got the bond which was great. Now we are back in the same legislators offices. The bond passed in 2000, if we are lucky, may last five years but it probably won't. And once it is all spent it is spent. And even with that money we are under-producing in our state. We have such a built up a huge housing deficit. The $2.1 billion sounds like a lot of money but we have been underproducing housing by 50 percent for over a decade.
SDL: What is the estimated shortfall in housing that is projected?
DS: The state estimates that we need about 220,000 new units of housing in California each year to accommodate our growth. Then they break it down. And we are only producing about half that amount for a really long time. We don't know what the total deficit amount is and we have this incredible budget deficit. We always wanted to go for the permanent, dedicated revenue source for housing. Our strategy was to identify an existing source of money that has something to do with housing and redirect a small amount of it for housing. We There is an existing tax for banks and corporations in CA. If you take even a quarter of a percent it would generate $200 million a year for housing. We lobbied for a bill that would do that but it was competing with local governments. The bill never went anywhere. Given this massive structural problem with our budget, redirecting nothing from nothing will probably not help. We now have a group that is doing a study to come up with three top revenue sources a real state source of housing funding. This has changed the conversation. Now it is: maybe we need a new tax.
SDL: How about a tax on new development?
DS: Maybe. We don't know what they are going to come up with. If you look at other states the most common source of funding [for affordable housing] is a real estate transfer tax. But in California we already have very complicated real estate transfer tax laws and there are Prop 13 implications so it is not clear if it would work for us or not. Thank God we have Prop. 46, the $2.1 billion Housing bond passed in November of last year, because it was approved by the voters we are pretty confident that they can't take it away. They took $40 million [from housing] in this last budget that they claimed was backfilling for commitments that they had already made but the longer they go out [from the passage of the Housing bond] on the timeline that argument just won't hold up any more. I didn't go into my voting booth and vote for Prop 46, the Emergency Housing and Shelter Act of 2002, thinking I was going to help balance the budget. So thank goodeness we know we have a little protection. But we don't have a dedicated source of funding for housing at the state level so we are doing our due diligence honing ideas about where we could go to get the money and then we will go back in and start all over again. The Governor hasn't said anything against housing and he is so pro business. And housing is an economic stimulus and it creates jobs. So we have all our arguments. And the Governor says he cares about children. Well, what is more important to a child than a stable home? We are in coalition with the California Future's Network on broader issues such as changing the way California land use policies are enacted. We have to change the rules of the game about how land use decisions get made. We are in coalition with environmental groups regionally and on the state level about promoting infill and more compact and transit oriented housing. Our affordable housing developers [here in Northern California] have been doing smart growth or fair growth development. That is what this is. There is a model. It works. We have put up 100,000's of units all over the Bay Area. People walk by and drive by every day and they don't even know that that [the housing our member produce] is affordable housing. And that is great because that is contemporary affordable housing at its best. It is completely integrated into the community.
SDL: Wouldn't a more robust inclusionary zoning law solve a lot of these problems?
DS: We have done a report, in collaboration with our sister coalition the rural group, about the status of inclusionary zoning in California. The National Housing Conference is going to publish it. There is a guy down at San Francisco State who will do an introduction with David Rosen who is a consultant on inclusionary housing. We calculate that if every community in CA had at a minimum a 10 percent inclusionary housing requirement over night you could double production.
SDL: But as it is now some communities adopt this and other do not.
DS: Yes. In the Bay Area every community sets it differently. We would like them to set the bar as high as they can. Local governments pretend that they don't like inclusionary housing or they say they can't possibly do this or it is too complicated. But inclusionary zoning is happening. Over 45 percent of the Bay Area jurisdictions already have some form of inclusionary housing. It is happening. It is a trend so get ready for it. In our report we elevate some case studies of communities that have really effective inclusionary housing policies. We illuminate what are the components of a successful inclusionary housing policy. And we show people that it does work.
SDL: But that is still voluntary. Why isn't there a state inclusionary housing policy?
DS: I can speak for our organization: we would love a state-wide inclusionary housing policy. Whether that is in the cards politically[who knows?] But it is certainly part of the conversation. I can tell you there is tremendous resistance. We have a long history of state/local band-aids. We even have a thing called the state's mandate commission that in theory is supposed to ensure that when the state mandates something on the locals that there is a funding stream to support that activity. But it is [nonsense]. And the housing is a perfect example. We have something called the Regional Housing Needs Determination Process where our Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) gives numbers [about how much affordable housing should be provided] in a negotiated process with all of our COGs councils of governments which are our regional planning agencies. In our area with have the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). They are our regional COG. So HCD tells our ABAG here are the regional numbers for your region for what you need to produce to accommodate the housing in your region. And in theory they are supposed to give money to ABAG to do that. But it is a seriously under-funded or unfunded area. In fact, in this last budget crisis negotiation, one of the things we were fighting for was for money in the HCD budget for funding the regional housing needs. And it got the budget axe. They symbolically left something ridiculous like $15,000 in the fund so they could technically say to the state mandates commission that they still had a fund. That is a serious problem. So we are going to get a lot of resistance from local governments [on mandating inclusionary zoning]. The communities that are more prescriptive in their inclusionary housing ordinances are the most effective. The more loosey goosey approaches are less effective. They permit in lieu fees [for not providing affordable unites in their development] or off site development [of affordable units]. The more voluntary it [the inclusionary housing program] is the less effective it is. However, ten years from now five years from now, maybe -- every community on California is going to have an inclusionary housing policy so theoretically you may not need the state.
SDL: What drives the trend?
DS: There is peer pressure that says: do the right thing. Certainly there is a social equity, social justice component to it. But it also makes good economic sense. You get a lot of for-profit developers who say they will just pass the costs [of providing affordable units] on to the consumer [of the market rate units]. Or they are saying I have to eat these fees [involved in providing some percentage of affordable units in their development project] and it is not fair. When we invited guests to editorialize on how inclusionary housing affects the market we asked David Rosen to do that piece for us. I can get you a copy of that. He has a complicated explanation about it.
SDL: What do you think of efforts to scatter affordable housing instead of just putting it wherever you can find a site?
DS: We haven't done a lot of work on that. Although we have housing authorities that are members of our association I think that issue tends to come up more in the public housing realm than it does with the non-profit affordable housing for rent developers. The city of San Jose has a dispersion policy where they have a requirement that affordable housing be dispersed. We are more focused on greasing the skids for the developers to make sure they have the resources [to build affordable units].
SDL: There is a controversy about dispersion. Some, [such as architect Mike Pyatok], argue that the point is to provide the community with the resources it needs to thrive not disperse the members of the community.
DS: In the Bay Area most of our developers feel that the quality of the product they are producing transforms certain neighborhoods and certain streets. In Marin City we have public housing next to home ownership housing next to rental housing. It is a completely mixed-income and mixed-use development. There is a project in gorgeous Larkspur where one our affordable housing developments is right next door on a lake with swans swimming next to a market-rate development. And they are indistinguishable. Part of what we have been trying to do is differentiate the product as contemporary affordable housing differentiate it from the stereotypical images of public housing but at the same time be integrated in a community context where they don't stand out. [Using this approach, residents] would not buy into the argument that a 350 unit development they just built had an adverse impaction on their community; they would see it as an improvement and an asset building neighborhood revitalization project. They don't even think about it in the way you frame the question. There are so many examples in the Bay Area of places that have been completely turned around and it has been the affordable housing that has been the catalyst.
SDL: Are you saying that there are no places where too much affordable housing is being built that have become the place to dump affordable housing?
DS: I am certain there are communities in the Bay Area I'm thinking of Vacaville where they don't want any more affordable housing. That is out there. But when the developers are making their decisions about where to go or are talking to local government officials about siting issues, I don't hear the impaction [issue raised]. It doesn't come up a lot.
SDL: What about putting too many very low income people in the same building? Is the funding such that you just can't do that?
DS: The funding stream pretty much dictates the population that is going to live in the building.
SDL: I hear it is hard to put up affordable housing for the very poor.
DS: There is no question that housing for the under 30 percent Area Median Income (AMI) is the hardest to build. And that is largely driven by the funding streams. In the Bay Area most of the housing that has been built in the last ten years are tax credit projects serving people at 40 to 50 percent of AMI. That is the way the deals are structured. Jane Graff could tell why.
SDL: It seems illogical that affordable housing should not go first to the people with the greatest need who have the least ability to compete for housing in the market.
DS: There is no question that there is tension in the field. Most of the non-profits would love to serve the lowest income groups. The for-profits would rather serve those in the higher income range. But there is even tension from non-profit to non-profit because there are certain non-profits that are a little more mission driven. There are different models and different organizational cultures. It would be interesting to look at the portfolios of some of the large non-profits. We are fortunate in the Bay Area, we are a unique place because we have the largest from-profit affordable housing developer in the country is here. That is Bridge. All of the large regional affordable housing developers in California are located here. There are four of them here: Mercy, Eden, Mid-Peninsula, and Bridge. In the mid 1990s were producing over 50 of the affordable housing in the region. There is another group called EAH, Ecumenical Association for Housing. Those are the big five. They happen all to be located here. At Mid Peninsula you should speak with Fran Wagstaff. She has been here for over 20 years and she is a sharp cookie. Fran has a huge Section 8 portfolio. She is always pushing to go down [the AMI scale]. These organizations do have a personality that is reflective of their leadership, their board, they way they were formed. In the case of Mercy Housing it is connected to the fact that they are a faith-based organization and they have the whole Catholic Healthcare West connection. They have a different approach toward assisted living. And Bridge tends to be more entrepreneurial and so does Eden. It is fascinating. But they all have a hard time getting [getting the funding to provide housing for people with incomes] below 30 percent AMI.
SDL: What would need to change to help these groups do affordable housing for people below 30 percent AMI?
DS: We don't have the public support in our country for a national policy on housing. That is why none of these programs are adequately funded or fully funded. That is why there is this group called the Campaign for Affordable Housing. They are a new 501c3 non-profit. They are a National Organization. They are going to try to do a national public education campaign around developing support for housing. Do you know Affordable Housing Finance magazine? Do you know Andre Sheshodi? It is a passion of his. He lives in Marin. He started with the magazine and now is starting a non-profit to do this. He has a board and is starting to raise money. You should talk with him. He is a real visionary. Andre Shasty. And they are hiring their first executive director. The reality is that to get the rents as low as you can possibly get them and get to the income levels at the bottom it requires public subsidy. There is Section 8 but it is not all that great is it? So we have a problem. We don't have a coherent national response to the nation's affordable housing crisis. And I have been here 11 years. How many times do I get the Harvard Joint Center's Nation's State of Housing; every September I get my "Out of Reach" report from the National Open Housing Coalition. It is good information. But year after year we produce these major studies that say we have the worst case housing needs of any country in the world and what are we going to do about that?
SDL: In the world? Are our housing needs worse than those in India or China?
DS: Not in the world but it is pretty bad. The National Open Housing Coalition in their report they put out a housing wage [how much you would have to make to afford housing] for every community in the country. In the Bay Area I have watched our housing wage go up. The Housing Wage is how much you would have to earn per hour to afford the average two bedroom apartment in your community. In San Francisco you would have to earn almost $35 an hour. It is $34.84 to afford your average two bedroom apartment now. If I am a hotel worker at the Hyatt I can't live in San Francisco so I am probably living in Patterson out in the Central Valley and car pooling with a bunch of other people and I am on the road four hours a day to come clean somebody's hotel room. Or I am living in the Mission District in a one bedroom apartment filled with 16 other people. You look at the issues of overcrowding, substandard housing [and it becomes clear that] people not able to live where they work. We have no leadership at the federal level [on this issue]. In California we have done a pretty goof job on the funding side but on the policy side this is where you go back to the Fair Growth thing there is a policy framework for all of this that needs to be implemented and deployed. And we need grassroots and grasstops support for it.
SDL: Why do you think this issue has not taken off?
DS: Because the people who have [wealth] do not care about the have-nots. We deal with that. I had to talk my parents into voting yes on the housing bond. I told them: Mom, Dad, you have your housing, great, but look at all the people in California who don't have housing. What about them? Well, why should I take care of them, they asked? People have a different attitude about housing. They are willing to pay for schools. Even senior citizens are willing to pay for schools despite the fact that their kids have grown up long ago. People are willing to pay for parks and open space. People are willing to pay their gas tax so they can get over that bridge. But they don't care about housing for people. In San Francisco we just had an election and we are having another in two weeks and public attitudes toward the homeless and poor people are not good. We had an initiative, and this is in San Francisco, for gosh sakes, that is a ballot measure calling for a very severe panhandling ordinance; and it passed by over 60 percent of the voters. So there is a hostility about the poor and a fear. And that has gotten worse and I have lived in San Francisco for 15 years and I think it has gotten way worse. I do think some kind of public education campaign is necessary. One phenomenon I have seen in our sector is that the housing advocacy community is frequently split. No wonder we are not making any progress. We are arguing with each other. We did get together around Prop 46 and that is why we won and we won big. But that took a really long time [to bring together the coalition]. Frequently there is a lack of unity over philosophically and over funding. What are the appropriate responses and the real solutions? People have all these different philosophies about effective community organizing: what works and what doesn't. And it tends to divide us and not unite us.
Interview SF, 11/19/2003
[SDL: Leaving the interview I asked myself: why do middle-class Americans hate and fear the poor? Are we physically afraid of them; or is it guilt about not helping them? Are the poor an affront to our self image of being a compassionate people? Is this hardening of attitudes towards the homeless a result of compassion fatigue? Then, written on the sidewalk in blue chalk I saw a message: "The homeless are people also.]