Supermarkets and Social Justice

Albertsons has announced that it is closing stores in San Francisco. So what do San Franciscans do? Need you ask?  Protest, of course!

A group of toddlers stood holding signs in front of the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Monday asking residents to help keep their neighborhood grocery stores open.

The children, with their parents, stood protesting at the future home of a Bristol Farms, a high-end supermarket with ties to Albertsons. Five of The City’s 28 major grocery stores have shut down in the last year, leaving some neighborhoods without a market to buy fresh produce, meat or dairy products.

The workers' union says the stores are being closed because they don't fit the template of mega-stores that are favored by supermarket owners:

Ron Lind, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 428, which represents the employees of 13 of the Bay Area Albertsons stores scheduled to shut down in August, said the company is closing the older stores that do not “meet the model of the new 50,000-square-foot stores” that most major grocers want to build.

Not so, says Albertsons:

 Quyen Ha of Albertsons said the decision is purely based on economics.

“When we kind of took a step back and looked at our entire profile of stores, it was that they represented 22 percent of stores but only bring in 12 percent of sales,” she said. “That was the major reason why.”

This isn't good enough for the activists.  People have a right to have a supermarket in their neighborhood.  Even if its operated at a loss:

“How will we get them to understand they cannot just up and close the Albertsons that means so much to everybody,” said Giselle Quezada, a resident who lives near the store.

Many residents are elderly or low-income and cannot afford to travel close to three miles to the closest supermarket, according to Quezada. At a rally on Monday, residents asked for Albertsons to help shuttle residents to the new store.

Hear that, Albertsons?  It doesn't matter if a store is a drag on your profits. You have a moral obligation to serve the community!  And you better not try to wiggle out of it or we'll sic the politicians on you:

In June, Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval pushed a measure through the Board of Supervisors to ask Albertsons to stay open or find a replacement store.

(Yes, the very same Gerardo Sandoval who told Sean Hannity  "I don't think we should have a military. Absolutely.")

The profit margin in the grocery business is razor-thin at best and getting thinner with competition from Wal-Mart at the low end and Molly Stone's and Whole Foods at the high end.  The reasons Ron Lind and Quyen Ha posed for the store closures aren't necessarily opposed. The only way a supermarket can stay in business is for it to increase its prices  or its volume.  It's the stores in the middle that are getting killed.

If the Board of Supervisors is serious about keeping supermarkets in the neighborhoods, it should make the business climate friendlier for them to operate, instead of heaping on new taxes. Sooner or later, Supervisor Aaron Peskin's tax 'em to the hilt policies will kill the goose that lays the golden egg.  But, until then it's easier to oppose Albertson's for closing stores while simultaneously making it harder for it to operate.

Going Against the Grain

To some New Urbanists, Vancouver is the "shining example" of all the good things that are supposed to happen when tall, slender highrise condominium towers are built at the downtown core:

The shining example of Vancouver is just a couple of hours from Seattle; it may be harder for some San Franciscans to visualize, but a city can be both highrise and humane. In fact, a few taller buildings downtown can make it easier to make the whole place more livable.

But is Vancouver really all it's cracked up to be?  An article in Governing Magazine takes a critical view of the Shining City of the North:

In fact, though, there is a compromise. Vancouver has begun to realize that its downtown is such a magnet for urban condo dwellers that it runs the risk of ceasing to serve the other purposes downtowns have traditionally served — as centers of commerce, corporate employment, jobs and overall economic life. It’s not that business has fled central Vancouver: The downtown peninsula still ranks first as an employment center within the metropolitan area, with about 77,000 jobs. But the percentage keeps going down, there have been virtually no major office building projects launched in this century, the amount of land available for new commercial development is almost non-existent, and given the still-explosive demand for high-rise urban living, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see what downtown Vancouver could become in a decade or two: a place where huge numbers of people live but not many work.

Cities that follow the Vancouver model risk killing the goose that lays the golden egg--commercial real estate.  Commercial properties pay more taxes and they require fewer services from municipal government.  Once businesses leave the urban core the wealth and power that once symbolized "downtown" evaporates, leaving...a resort:

”The city we are shaping in the current boom,” says local architecture critic Trevor Boddy, “is something quite different from any notion of what a downtown is, was or will be — more of a resort than a conventional downtown.”

In a series of newspaper columns, in architecture journals and in public speeches, Boddy has challenged almost every aspect of the Living First orthodoxy. He has warned American cities not to copy it. But the arrow that made a direct hit was his “Fool’s Paradise” article in the Vancouver Sun in August 2005. “We may once have dreamed of taking our place in the list of the world’s great cities,” Boddy wrote, “but unless something is changed soon, to preserve and promote our downtown as a place to work, we will instead join Waikiki and Miami Beach on the list of resorts filling up with aging baby boomers lounging around their over-priced condos.”

Ouch!  As a premier vacation destination already, San Francisco could soon be added to that list of resort towns if the plans to Vacouverize the area around the Transbay Terminal take shape. 

Romney-Clinton in 08?

On Tuesday night there was a tunnel collapse in The Big Dig that killed a woman.  As a result, criticism of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and its Chairman and CEO Matt Amorello for poor oversight of the $14.8 billion bridge and tunnel project has reached a fever pitch, to the point where Governor Mitt Romney filed emergency legislation to take over the MTA.  It's no secret that Romney has been mentioned as a presidential candidate, but who knew that he was planning to run as a Democrat?  Apparently, Fox News did:

Romney, who is considering seeking the 2008 Democratic nomination for president, has focused his sharpest criticism on the Turnpike Authority. After the deadly ceiling collapse, he said he would take legal action to oust Amorello as it's chief.

Considering how dismal the prospective Democratic presidential candidates are, it'll be nothing short of a master stroke if Howard Dean can talk Mitt Romney into running for President as a Democrat.  (And if you believe that, Matt Amorello has a tunnel he wants to sell you...cheap!)

Really though, the MTA has behaved disgracefully. If you go to its home page there is NO MENTION of the tunnel collapse.  Only a brief advisory that a connector tunnel is closed.  And check out Matt's Chairman's message:

Summer is the season for family vacations and cookouts and the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority has all its resources ready to help you find a fun tourist destination and to get you there safely.

C'mon Matt; it's not enough to just to have resources ready to get people to their destinations safely--you've got to use them!!

A Man's Home is his Castle

Steve Boland takes on the Protect our Homes Initiative over at SF Cityscape with this scare language:

 ...it's a trojan horse bearing a radical property rights agenda. In fact, part of it has nothing at all to do with eminent domain; it's classic "takings" legislation straight out of the libertarian playbook, an assault on the very idea of land use regulation... this is what the backlash against Kelo has wrought: The door is open, and wolves are outside...

Uh oh....it's those evil libertarian wolves again, trying to foist their agenda on all those good communitarian sheep who believe in "common welfare" and "the greater good". 

We posted this in the comments and it bears saying it again:

The United States was founded on the Lockean proposition that government's authority comes from the consent of the governed. Every so often something happens when the governed tell the government "fuggedaboutit" and Kelo is one of them.

There is a fundamental belief in this country that a man's home is his castle. This belief draws upon English common law. It is central to the rights that our Constitution guarantees, for if you cannot be secure from government intrusion in the privacy of your own home, then you have no rights.

Kelo struck at the heart of this deeply-held belief; suddenly, property owners became mere leaseholders whose leases could be abruptly terminated if a local government found a higher and better for the land your home occupied.

Opposition to the unjust use of eminent domain is not a conservative vs. progressive issue; Kelo was decried not only by conservative property rights advocates such as Congressman Richard Pombo (R-Tracy) but also by liberal Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Inglewood), who understood that the decision would hit hardest poor, minority homeowners whose low value properties would be a tempting target for revenue-hungry city governments.

This is why there has been such an immediate, visceral reaction to the decision by left and right. In one regard Boland is correct; the Protect Our Homes Initiative is not the best property rights law that could have been crafted; but the state legislature was unwilling or able to do so, just as it was unable to pass property tax reform in 1978, which resulted in Prop. 13.

I reject Boland's appeals to "common welfare" and "the greater good" --as reasons to oppose property rights legislation. These are nothing more than progressive shibboleths that are trotted out in the same way a fundamentalist preacher trots out God to argue against gay marriage.

It's worth remembering that the forced collectivization of the peasants in the Soviet Union and the Cultural Revolution in China were for the common welfare and the greater good. Whenever someone uses those terms you know somebody's ox is being gored.

An initiative like Protect Our Homes didn't just happen.  For it to get one million signatures, it had to tap in to an undercurrent of anger at how in recent years land use regulation has tipped the scales in favor of the greater good and against individual rights.  The scales are about to be tipped back.   

The Bicyclist has No Shorts

Urbanities has previously noted the unctuous, overweening self-regard of Bay Area bicycle activists, so we were vastly amused at the howls of outrage that greeted the Preliminary Injunction issued by Superior Court Judge James Warren that enjoined the City from implementing the Bike Plan until an environmental review is conducted.

Apparently, bicycle activists consider themselves above the law. They feel that it is so self evident that bicycles are an unmitigated good and cars an umitigated evil that the City should not be subject to the laws that require they take into account the effect that making traffic-related changes (we hesitate to call them improvements) for bicyclists at the expense of automobiles will have. Bicycle activists have accomplished this by getting themselves appointed to positions within city government where they can literally rubber stamp every bicycle-friendly proposal into existence without due process.

Kudos to Rob Anderson, the Coalition for Adequate Review and 99 Percent for exposing the FUBU (for us, by us) way that activists in San Francisco get laws passed to favor their pet agendas.