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Indybay Feature

The unabashed apostasy at San Francisco's Civic Center

by David Giesen
City Hall facilitated a cruel disdain for real estate justice when it barred the citizenry from public land and rented out Civic Center to those whose narrow public interests are inflating SF rents.
An unidentified, but top-notch cover band played some of the finest counter-culture '60s and 'early '70s San Francisco grooves at the gated party at Civic Center Wednesday evening. Produced as an end-of-the-day frolic for attendees of a massive biotech conference at the Moscone Center, the party's tasteless homage to San Francisco's conventions-bending Summer of Love mocked the city's direful crisis of housing displacement.

While the band sang of "wearing flowers in your hair," the masters of real estate stuffed more of the population's earned income into their rentier pockets. How is it that in a city bursting with unearned real estate income for those who own the land, it is public land that is prostituted to pay for the truffles and threads of the political elites, even as the general population is banished from the front yard of city hall? Easy. The popular culture doesn't consider land values to be the rightful property of society as a whole. So instead of insisting on treating annual land values in full as public revenue, public policy leaves the land-owning class to share-crop land values.

The upshot is that the Bay Region's high-flying land values don't pay for much public infrastructure, much less cross-subsidize the cost of real estate for those whose incomes cannot match the wages of the high tech and bio-tech industries.

And nowhere, no how, was that point more emphatically made than at Civic Center Wednesday evening as socially oblivious BIO conference attendees imagined through the Santana and Deadesque music that they were in the transformational Age of Aquarious San Francisco of 50 years ago. And all this the day after Ed Lee's candidate for President won the day. What question can there be as to whether Ms. Clinton's presumptive administration will change the nation's core beliefs regarding real estate and community?

When we reflect that land is the surest evidence we have of a mighty, creative force to the universe, and when we reflect that coequal access to land is the elemental condition of justice in society, how else are we to characterize the privatization of land except as the nth of apostasy?
by Fellow Commoneer
The writer is right on. .
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