SF Breeders

California Legalizes Gay Marriage!

In a tight 4-3 vote, the California Supreme Court today ruled that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry.  This is a huge win for everyone, especially for the countless LGBT couples in San Francisco which want to have the full rights of a married couple when it comes to raising children in SF - why shouldn't it be easier for them to join all of us in the pain and joy of raising children in San Francisco?  Given that my brother will be marrying his boyfriend in NY in August (technically a civil ceremony), I'm now encouraging them to swing by CA at some point in August to make it fully legal.

In addition, as my father pointed out, it's going to be a big economic win for California.  For the months of June through November, we're going to have countless gay couples rushing to get married in CA, driving the economy upward since weddings are incredibly expensive affairs.  On a less favorable note, tons of right wing, conservative and religious organizations will now hurl tens of millions of dollars into CA politics and media trying to to pass the November ballot initiative banning this inevitable process - but at least it will help our economy in the meantime  :)

The anti-gay wedding bigots may win in the short run, as has happened in most states in the US where this process has gone forward.  That having been said, this decision is one more chip in the wall, and as we saw in Berlin, that wall eventually comes down.  As the homophobic older voter base continues to die off, the gay marriage effort will finally pass, just as it did with inter-racial marriage in the 60's, but unfortunately, millions of loving gay couples will suffer in the meantime. 

For now, however, this is a great day for everyone, including parents in San Francisco.

Defending SF Rent Control? - Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

San Francisco is on fire again this month as we head towards yet another random amendment-filled election, and this time one of the key issues is rent control.  So the reasonable question comes down to rent control, and whether that makes sense, thus the blog title similar to the popular game show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader"?

The simple answer is that rent control, in a general basis, is nothing short of retarded - and I mean that in the harshest way, so no, you are NOT smarter than a 5th grader if you think rent control makes even a modicum of sense. 

Let's talk about what it is - Rent Control is the concept of making landlords rent units below the going market rate of what they would normally get - it makes no sense, unless you live in a 1970's socialist country.  Even 5th Grader host Jeff Foxworthy could quickly figure out that forcing private land owners to rent below the market rate might actually make them less interested in fixing up the place vs forcing out the existing renters.

So what do we do?  In a tough housing city, the first thing we do is focus on selling off & giving away surplus city properties to developers who will build low income housing, so we increase the supply, especially for city employees, even if it reduces the sales price.  The next thing we do is start to phase out rent control over a period of years, especially on higher priced rents for non-senior renters, just like Boston, New York and Santa Monica have done in recent years, which are not exactly hot beds of conservative thoughts.  Finally, we focus on an actual set of discussions around rent control where Mayor Gavin Newsom takes a stand and shows an opinion, especially one which recognizes the low income demands of SF while also recognizing how even my 2nd Grader can figure out that forcing landlords to rent below their cost of ownership makes us all Dumber than a 5th Grader...

Victoria Manalo Draves Park - great downtown SF park

I went to see my son play t-ball on Saturday, and it was played in an amazing downtown San Francisco park - Victoria Manalo Draves, on 6th and Folsom (see here).  This little gem of a park has a beautiful little league field, a small dog park, 2 play structures for different ages, and a full basketball court - it's like a microcosm of San Francisco politics - trying to please everyone at the same time, but in this case, unlike the dysfunctional Board of Supervisors and Mayor Gavin Newsom, it's actually succeeding.   It opened October, 2006 and is named after an SF double medalist in the 1948 London Olympics.

The admittedly urban park in a somewhat rough neighborhood has a limited amount of grafitti, and a small homeless issue (bathrooms in particular), but it gets a great deal of use from a really diverse audience - it's a great example of the best that an urban SF park can offer, and I encourage downtown parents to give it a shot if they have not done so yet.

Crocker Amazon Skatepark - what a bummer

I took the boys out to the only skateboard park in San Francisco today, which is the Crocker Amazon one.  This park is next to impossible to find since it has literally no signage, but it's located right past the Cow Palace on Geneva Ave, and is next to the new turf athletic field construction project.   

What a disappointing experience - the bowl is covered in graffiti and trash, with dirt at the bottom of the bowl.  The place looks like an empty swimming pool surrounded by a huge fence.  The only good news was that it was almost empty, presumably due to its condition and location.

As SF Chronicle columnist Ken Garcia outlined here in 2000, this park cost over $500,000, but appears to to be the product of some half-assed attempt to check a box in someone's To Do list of construction projects vs actually creating something of value.  Given how many kids in the city would like to skate in a better situation vs doing so illegally along the Embarcadero, it would be great if the city at least cleaned up the bowl.  In the meantime, I recommend the Alameda Skatepark, at least in the morning before the crowd gets a little rough, and if you ever get to Truckee, the public skatepark there is one of our favorites

California School Funding Slipping to 50th in United States

According to this article in the SF Examiner (here), Governor Schwarzenegger's proposed cuts in the CA school budget will finally drop us to 50th out of 50 states in state funding - now that's quite an achievement.  As a state with the 8th largest economy in the entire world, we now fund our schools at a level lower than Mississippi!

Having just been through this budget discussion at my son's school as a member of the Alvarado Site Council, it's a painful set of reductions to a system that is already under-funded.  At the same time that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (NASDAQ: MSFT) is sitting in front of Congress lamenting the state of science and engineering education in America, we have cut those programs entirely at the public school level.

At a certain point, the Governor must either raise taxes or decide to make other reductions in the budget since these changes will only accelerate the flight out of public schools, right at a time where San Francisco is seeing a recent increase in public school attendance.  Or we could admit Puerto Rico as a 51st state and hopefully be above them in funding for at least one more year...