Salesforce vs Twitter in San Francisco fight without roof taxes
Salesforce vs Twitter in San Francisco fight without roof taxes
San Francisco has become known throughout the world as a place for aggressive beggars, outdoor drug use and expanding tent camps, dirt and despair are even more remarkable for the immense wealth of the city.
Some streets are so dirty that officials launched a special "poop patrol". A young technology worker created "Snapcrap", an application to report dirt. The passers-by of the morning walk energetically in front of homeless people huddled against the walls of the subway. In the squalid center of the city, the frail and sick crawl in wheelchairs or stumble, sometimes half-dressed.
The situation has become so serious that a coalition of activists collected enough signatures to put a measure on the city's ballot on November 6 that would test hundreds of San Francisco's richest companies to help thousands of residents. homeless and mentally ill, an effort that failed earlier. year in seattle. Proposition C would raise $ 300 million a year, almost doubling what the city already spends to fight homelessness.
"This is the worst thing ever," says Marc Benioff, founder of cloud computing giant Salesforce and a fourth-generation San Franciscan, which supports the measure even though his company would pay an additional $ 10 million a year if it is aproved. "Nobody should have to live like that, they do not need to live like this, we can have this under control."
"We have to do it, we have to try something," said Sunshine Powers, owner of a dyeing boutique, Love on Haight, in the historic neighborhood of the city of Haight-Ashbury. "If my community is bad, nobody will want to come here."
The proposal is the latest battle between defenders of big business and social services that demand that US companies pay to resolve the inequalities exacerbated by their success. In San Francisco, it has also become an intriguing struggle between the newly elected mayor London Breed, who is on the side of the city's Chamber of Commerce asking for a negative vote, and the philanthropist Benioff, whose company is the largest private employer of San Francisco with 8,400 workers.
The race was tough on the measure, saying it lacked collaboration, could attract homeless people from neighboring counties to the city, and could cost middle-class jobs in retail and services. San Francisco has already dramatically increased spending on homelessness, he said, without any noticeable improvement.
San Francisco spent $ 380 million of its $ 10 billion budget last year on services related to the homeless.
"I have to make decisions with my head, not just my heart," Breed said. "I do not think that doubling what we spend on homeless people without a new responsibility, when we do not even spend what we have now efficiently, is a good government."
Cities along the West Coast are grappling with the growing lack of housing, driven in part by the growing number of well-paid technological jobs that make low-income residents unable to access crowded residential markets. A family of four in San Francisco earning $ 117,000 is considered low income.
Business prevailed in Seattle, when leaders in June repealed a tax per employee that would have raised $ 50 million a year, after Amazon and Starbucks rejected it. In July, the Cupertino City Hall in Silicon Valley got a similar similar tax after opposition from its largest employer, Apple Inc.
Mountain View residents, however, will vote this fall for an employee tax that is expected to raise $ 6 million a year, largely from Google, for transit projects.
The San Francisco measure is different in that it would impose the tax primarily on income rather than on the number of employees, an average increase in taxes of half a percent on company revenues above $ 50 million. every year. It was also put on the ballot by citizens, not by elected officials.
Online payment processing company Stripe has expressed opposition and contributed $ 420,000 to the campaign against Proposition C, but other companies have remained silent. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, whose board includes representatives from Microsoft, LinkedIn and Oracle, is leading the fight.
Up to 400 companies would be affected, and the internet and financial services sectors paid almost half the cost.
The city says that confidentiality prevents disclosure of tax information, but some of the companies that are expected to pay more are big names in major industries. Wells Fargo & Co., retailer Gap Inc. and the Uber platform declined to comment.
Pharmaceutical distributor McKesson Corp. forwarded the questions to a private sector trade association, the Jobs Committee, which called the measure defective. Utility company Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. said it has not taken a position. Twitter declined to comment, but Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said through a tweet last week that he trusts Breed to solve the problem.
"Anyone can see the status quo and understand that it does not work, but only money is not the only answer," says Jess Montejano, spokesperson for the "No en C" campaign.
Benioff does not agree. A two-year $ 37 million initiative that helped start the city and that contributed more than $ 11 million has housed nearly 400 families through rental subsidies, he said.
Benioff has pledged at least $ 2 million of company and personal resources for the November tax campaign. He said that ultimately, he was influenced by a report from the city's chief economist, which determined that the measure would likely reduce homelessness and result in a net loss of 900 jobs at the maximum, or 0.1 percent all jobs.
"I said, 'Well, I'm the biggest employer in the city and the city is in decline because of homelessness and cleanliness, we have to take action now,'" he said.
At least half of the new income would go to permanent housing and at least a quarter to services for people with serious behavioral problems. A one-night count of 2017 found an estimated 7,500 people without permanent shelter in San Francisco. More than half had lived in the city for at least a decade.
Tracey Mixon and her daughter, Maliya, 8, are among the hidden homeless.
Mixon, 47, of San Francisco, lives and works in the neighborhood of Tenderloin, notoriously dangerous and infested with drugs. They were forced to abandon their rent this summer, in part because the company that managed their property lost its federal accreditation, he said on a recent afternoon while working on a crossing guard shift.
One of the most difficult parts was finding a place to go for the day when the mother and daughter were expelled from an emergency shelter overnight.
"I have to protect it from people who use drugs," he said. "I have to protect her from people who might be fighting."
By hanging out at Haight, the street that played a central role in the "Summer of Love," the stormy day of Nichole, 22, says he would love a place to live. Currently, Day is sleeping in a door. She could thrive if her basic needs were met, she said.
"And that includes a house, a place to cook and a place to shower."
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