City Hall’s Addiction to BS - Commentary

On truth and lies and a hyper-local stench.

Supervisor London Breed loves to say that a policy she supports “may be unpopular, but”... but what? “But you and I know better, don’t we,” she implies with an invisible wink. If you already agree with her, it feels good to think so.

It’s a ridiculous thing to say when you’re trying to get elected as Mayor of San Francisco. If her ideas are popular, she’ll win. But the truth of the statement doesn’t matter: as the United States now knows in 2018, performances win elections, not ideas. In a word, such statements are bullshit.

What is bullshit? 

Bullshit, as understood by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, is a rhetorical performance in which the truth is deliberately disregarded as a means to assert the speaker’s dominance over the bounds of the discourse. “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction,” Frankfurt declared in his lightweight tome On Bullshit.

Today’s political discourse is dysfunctionally encumbered with bullshit because we reward it with a raw volume of eyeballs, but without careful scrutiny. Avoiding that scrutiny of one’s power is the whole point of the endeavor. Admittedly, it may neither be realistic nor desirable to have a public culture entirely without some bullshit here and there. There’s a reason more people watch Top Chef than C-SPAN.

But when political machinery employs bullshit simply to flex its own power, it gives us a false sense of certainty and comfort. Maybe we shouldn’t treat the halls of civic power like our favorite cooking competition. Although the divisions easily fall apart upon closer inspection, it’s difficult even for the most seasoned politicos to avoid this paradigm of competitive bloodsport. 

Broadly speaking, the two informal parties that run San Francisco City Hall are the “Progressives,” a party of bold bullshitters, and the “Moderates,” a party of mealy-mouthed mumblers. Allow me to explain.

How does bullshit work?

When a majority of the Board of Supervisors voted to replace Acting Mayor London Breed with Interim Mayor Mark Farrell on January 23rd, the excuse that it was intended to avoid an unfair incumbency advantage in the June 2018 election was obviously bullshit. There’s bullshit by omission, and bullshit by obfuscation, and both strains were on full display throughout that calculated political tussle. 

Facts about fairness and good governance were neither true nor false—they were rendered irrelevant under an astounding display of bullshit by Supervisor Hillary Ronen. Ronen’s infamous speech crystallized all the glaring contradictions of San Francisco’s white liberalism: with full knowledge that she would be voting to appoint then-Supervisor Mark Farrell, a white, Catholic, male venture capitalist as Interim Mayor, Ronen, a white attorney living in upscale Bernal Heights, descended from Mount Olympus to decry the greed and moral wretchedness of the coalition supporting London Breed. Though a largely African-American constituency had spoken in favor of Breed at the meeting, Ronen reduced the City’s first black female mayor to a mere stooge of the villainous tech investor, Ron Conway.

“I have to say it, there are white, rich men, billionaires, in this city who have steered the policies of the past two mayoral administrations, if not more,” Ronen declared through tears. “I hate to say it, I wish it weren’t so, but those white men are so enthusiastically supporting your candidacy, London Breed."

But Ronen was careful to perform white guilt to its most dramatic, self-abnegating heights, kicking up dust-clouds of rhetoric in an effort to defend herself from optics that “border[ed] on evil,” of white people deposing a black woman in favor of a rich white man.

“I know that anyone who is not a straight, white, Christian male has been fighting at great cost, for 250 years for equal representation in this country,” she continued. “As a straight, white woman my privilege means I’m in no way qualified to decide which of these candidates’ backgrounds makes them more deserving of the huge advantage of running while having the entire apparatus of the mayor’s office at their disposal. I’m not willing to choose the LGBT community over the African American community or the African American community over the Asian community.”

She knew, of course, that she was choosing none of the above. By qualifying her decision to vote for “any caretaker,” though it would later become common knowledge that her allies on the Board had already chosen Farrell, she sought to absolve herself from the full implications of what she was doing. She hoped it wouldn’t look so bad that she had voted to install a caretaker mayor whose firm listed none other than Ron Conway as one of its many investors; she hoped to avoid blowback when it was revealed that Farrell’s employers had privately celebrated the appointment. More importantly, she likely hoped to distance herself from Farrell’s strong conservative stances against homeless tent encampments and in favor of the local police union, two policy agendas the nominally progressive bloc has vocally opposed.

Ronen hoped her speech would conceal how obvious it was that the appointment of an Interim Mayor had nothing to do with democratic principles or progressive policy, and everything to do with partisan power. Too late. We all knew it was bullshit.

Crucially, however, the moderate camp did not commit themselves to a maudlin mockery of righteousness, or to any view in particular. Rather, Supervisor Jeff Sheehy, the swing vote that delivered the mayoralty to Farrell, likewise insisted that he wanted to appoint any interim mayor, even Breed, to separate the President of the Board’s role from the Mayor’s office, as the city charter requires. He had merely upheld the law. Farrell, for his part, wasn’t even in the room.

More recently, Mayor Farrell proudly proclaimed that San Francisco’s ferries would be transitioning to clean biodiesel fuel, reducing their carbon emissions by 60%. What he didn’t mention that ferries account for just 1.1% of the City’s greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. How could he be criticized when he never claimed otherwise?

Farrell’s strategy at the very least holds the truth in some form of esteem, implicitly acknowledging its presence, though hesitating to be implicated in its nuances. Meanwhile, the nominally progressive faction is more willing to bullshit their way in a position of righteousness, irrespective of empirical outcomes.

Take this statement by Supervisor Jane Kim, the progressive stalwart mayoral candidate, on the ultimately successful negotiations for affordable housing at the Giants’ Mission Rock project: “We know that we have a housing crisis, but it’s not just a housing crisis, it is an affordability crisis.“

This is so trivially true, it conveys nothing meaningful. (When have San Francisco’s ongoing, reliably cyclical housing crises ever not been about affordability?) However, what’s more important is that the tautology is employed as rhetorical bullshit to shield a visibly ineffective public policy agenda from criticism.

What is at stake when there’s so much bullshit? 

Proposition C, the affordable housing mandate passed at the ballot in 2016 by Kim and her ally Supervisor Aaron Peskin, was expertly cloaked in bullshit. When the City Controller pointed out in his report that a 25% requirement would push many developments past the brink of fiscal feasibility, Prop C proponents simply ignored that risk, and Supervisors reluctantly hammered out a deal lowering it to 18% the following year.

The underlying premise of the Controller’s initial report in 2016 was never addressed: “Policy changes that make market-rate housing projects infeasible raise the value of existing housing, by reducing the number of houses on the market at any point in time.”

And later, in 2017: “Since the inclusionary policy does not change the demand for market rate units, the reduced supply of housing will tend to push up prices relative to what would otherwise be the case. To the extent this occurs, consumers seeking housing would ultimately pay for the policy, in the form of higher market-rate housing prices.”

Ultimately, the goalposts shifted. Suddenly it had never been about producing twice as much affordable housing, and it certainly had never been about bringing the average price of housing down. It was about making developers pay a premium for the privilege of building in San Francisco, never mind that everybody already knew renters would ultimately foot the bill. 

It wasn’t even about making all developers pay—these bullshitters aren’t stupid. All throughout the drafting process, Peskin and Kim openly negotiated with market-rate developers to ensure that certain projects with uncertain financing could secure exemptions from Prop C’s mandate. Otherwise, the counterproductive impacts might become too obvious, too soon.

When asked about this during a town hall forum in mid-2016, Peskin admitted: “You try to get as much as you can get without blowing things up…What this means is, if you’re reaching back in the pipeline, it’s costing someone some amount of money.” (Again, the City Controller’s report argued that this cost could result in higher average rents citywide.) “So, when they said to their lender, whether it was a REIT or a pension fund, ‘hey, bad news, we have to do more affordable housing’—that’s the negotiations we were doing.”

It was an odd but remarkably candid statement for Peskin to make, given his reputation as a man of the tenant. It was a roundabout, bullshit way to imply that he couldn’t care less what the Controller had said.

Had Peskin simply owned up to the trade-off his policy necessitated—”it will guarantee lower rents for some, while raising everyone else’s rents”—it would have been unpopular, but both principles and politics would be clear for all to assess on the merits. Evidently, the Supervisor was not concerned with outcomes, or with truth; he just wanted to have his way. He doesn’t care if the public loses money or affordable housing when he asserts his power. 

For example, Peskin was not at all concerned with the CalSTRS pension fund when they were a major investor in the 8 Washington project. He (along with real estate firm Boston Properties, landlords of One Embarcadero whose view, as it happens, would have been obscured by 8 Washington) went to great lengths to sink that project, ultimately costing the state teachers pension fund $44 million.

More recently, Peskin lost $10 million in the sale of city-owned real estate at 30 Van Ness, a discount which fails to guarantee more affordable housing than what the foregone revenue could have produced.

Few politicians in the City know the power of bullshit more than Peskin, who skillfully grafts it onto empty political power plays to perform vignettes of progressive democracy. He even knows it well enough to publicly inveigh against it, while he piles it even higher.

“You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own set of facts,” Peskin declared, as an ironic quotation of his former rival on the Board, State Senator Scott Wiener. Peskin was determined to point out all the factual errors of Wiener’s housing density bill, SB 827, in a Land Use and Transportation Committee hearing to determine the City’s official position on Wiener’s proposal.

Of course, it turned out Peskin did bring his own set of facts. While Peskin had been warning of the public of the bill’s potential to demolish and displace vulnerable tenants in a development bonanza, Senator Wiener had amended the bill to make explicit that local demolition controls still apply. Supervisor Ahsha Safai noted that his district is made up of single family homes and duplexes, both of which enjoy strong demolition protections.

"The unfortunate thing about this legislation is that there has been a lot of misinformation,” Safai lamented. (Maybe he meant bullshit.) “Our demolition controls are probably the strongest in the state of California. You can laugh, but we don't live in Merced, we don't live in Antioch. They don't have any demolition controls.” 

Safai went on to say that initially he was very concerned about the bill, but after looking at it, he concluded it would actually make a difference in very little of his district, and in very little of any district. He also pointed out Senator Wiener had added relocation payments and a right of return for any displaced tenants in places that don’t have demolition controls. Peskin had been reading from an outdated report. 

Let us turn to Frankfurt once again for an apt summary of this situation: “Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.”

Wiener’s bill was eventually canned in its first Senate committee hearing. State Senator Mike McGuire, representing Marin and Sonoma Counties, cast a decisive vote against the bill, citing his concerns that recent amendments did not include high enough mandates for low-income housing.

Not surprisingly, that was bullshit, too, of the most hypocritical flavor. Last year, state legislators from Marin succeeded in passing a major exemption for the wealthy suburban area from statewide low-income housing requirements, in exchange for supporting  Brown’s gas tax to fund transportation infrastructure. Senator McGuire has no plans to bring more subsidized housing to Marin County. It never even mattered that it was bullshit; he flexed his power with a flourish of bullshit, and that was enough.

Likewise, the Kim and Peskin faction hardly takes a principled stance for affordable housing when it counts. For some reason, they’ve made the calculus that it doesn’t put wind in their sails, and it’s not even worth bullshitting about. Kim held a widely-publicized rally against SB 827 in the wealthy suburban neighborhood of West Portal, not far from where a low-income senior housing project proposed in Forest Hill crumbled under threats of litigation from angry neighborhood groups, and a dearth of financing options amid rising costs. 

Kim was nowhere to be seen in the debate over that project, nor did she support affordable housing at 88 Broadway, which Peskin joined the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association in opposing. Once again, the goalposts had moved from providing affordable housing for a broader range of incomes, to a navigation center, to outright opposition. It did not matter that the nonprofit developer BRIDGE Housing had built and operated a project several blocks away; nor did it matter that, by definition, they didn’t do it for a profit. Peskin charged that BRIDGE did not have “relationships in the neighborhood” and simply “flips” subsidized properties, just because he could.

Perhaps “bullshit” can be better illustrated as a person who just loves the sound of their own voice—power asserting itself for its own sake. 

Why is there so much bullshit?

Kim’s opposition to Wiener’s bill was never strictly about affordability or the aesthetics—different constituencies got different answers in that regard—it was simply something in the news that was easy and popular to object to. You were never supposed to believe her, so how can anyone say she lied? It’s just bullshit. It’s high time for our news media to call out power for its own excesses, and to expose rampant bullshit as such, rather than giving it equal weight in the discourse as mere content. 

Rival mayoral candidate London Breed seems keenly aware of this dynamic, particularly when she notoriously lambasted progressive editor Tim Redmond, dismissing his site 48hills.org as a “bullshit-ass blog.”

While otherwise a seasoned reporter himself, Redmond frequently runs the unfiltered opinions of veteran housing activist Calvin Welch, who argued in the 1970s that prohibiting dense apartment construction in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood would increase property values—a policy he supported at the time. (This prediction seems largely proven correct today.) There was zero accountability for factual accuracy when Welch described a local Density Bonus program as “ethnic cleansing,” when it was designed to produce more subsidized housing on net. Facts were simply not germane to the language-game being played.

With no sense of irony, 48 Hills also runs surface-level leftist opinions against real estate profits and increased density from Berkeley politician Zelda Bronstein, who nevertheless owns at least $30 million in rental properties in San Mateo County, and according to public records, has evicted both commercial and residential tenants in her properties. All this progressive performance is more decisively rendered bullshit by the publication of a recent op-ed by Beverly Hills Vice Mayor John Mirisch, who espouses social justice concerns despite his record of rampant xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment on other op-ed pages.

Do these widely-read political observers genuinely care about profits and poverty, or only when it serves their partisan purposes?

The current environment, perversely, allows the powerful to perform their own denunciation to avoid accountability. Progressive watchdogs are supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Yet news outlets bullshit their way through that, too. 

Frankfurt offers us a simple reason why there’s so much bullshit in the news: “...Closely related instances [of bullshit] arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything”—okay, ouch, Harry! 

We rely on news media because we’re supposed to value the quality of opinions over sheer quantity. After all, not everyone has the time to call up every line in City Hall and ask how their local democracy is going. So the local media still serves as the main line of communication between the City’s powerful and those affected by their power. We’re not doing our jobs if we keep enabling the bullshit. Should we all keep failing as a “fourth estate,” then may the Lord brand my breast with a scarlet “B” for Bullshitter to bear in perpetual shame.

There’s more than enough political theater to go around, but at some point the curtains have to come down. Bullshit has consequences. Regardless of how much bullshit paves their path to the polls, our representatives will be responsible for addressing the most pressing problems that leave many of their constituents on the street, in crippling debt, or in an early grave. 

And that’s no bullshit.

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