potrero view

October 2009

Publisher’s View: Jobs

By Steven J. Moss

Roughly one out of 10 San Franciscans – almost 45,000 residents – are looking for work.  The City, like the state, is experiencing the highest unemployment levels in a quarter century.  While things are bad for many San Franciscans, they’re even worse in Bayview-Hunters Point, Little Hollywood, Silver Terrace, and Visitacion Valley – Potrero Hill’s southern neighbors – where upwards of one out of three residents don’t have a job.  

Unemployment is nothing new to these neighborhoods.  As reported in last month’s View (“Southeast San Franciscans Continue to Search for Work”) according to one Bayview resident, “…although the recession is hard this is how we live day to day anyway.”  Under-educated – in part due to poor quality public schools – unconnected, with social networks that, unlike wealthier communities, frequently don’t provide avenues towards mainstream employment; and, in some cases, speaking English-as-a-second-language, many Southeast San Francisco residents are especially vulnerable when the economic tide goes out.  

Jobs are created by the government, the private sector, or some combination of the two.  Public sector employment, starting with the launch of the Works Progress Administration in 1935, followed by defense spending pumped into the Hunters Point Shipyard, Treasure Island Naval Base, and other locations, as well as hiring by the U.S. Post Office during the second half of the 20th century, helped create today’s middle class, particularly among African-Americans.  Both my grandfather, who worked as a civil engineer for the City of Chicago during the Depression, and my father, an aerospace engineer who worked on the Apollo space launches, directly benefited from government-created jobs.

Although federal, state, and local governments provide paychecks to millions of Americans, the private sector, which is responsible for more that two-thirds of the national economy in a good year, employs even more.  And it’s predominately small businesses that create new jobs; two out of three new hires over the last year were by business with less than 500 employees.  Small businesses also invest in their communities at higher levels than larger corporations.  According to the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchant Alliance, diverting just 10 percent of purchases from national chain stores – Walgreens, McDonalds, Starbucks – to locally owned San Francisco enterprises would, each year, create 1,300 new jobs in the City.  

Current federal employment efforts center on broad spending on education, energy, health care, and other socially desirable activities.  A large chunk of change is going to training programs, particularly related to green jobs.  The theory behind this spending is that it will jump-start the economy from its near-death experience last year, and help create the workforce of the future.  Early evidence is that the federal investment has helped stop our economic free fall, and has temporarily patched holes in public schools and other essential budgets.  But these expenditures will only create long-term jobs if they either lead to direct government hires, or spark new, sustainable, private sector economic activity.  Without such activity freshly trained San Franciscans this year and next will still be unemployed when federal funds run out.

Large-scale job creation programs are best left to the federal government, which has the resources – and borrowing capacity – to support such efforts.  However, the City and County of San Francisco can, and does, play a role in addressing chronic unemployment.  Right now the City is in a poor position to undertake expansive new growth in direct government employment, with arguably too many civil servants as it is.  Instead, we need to look to the private sector, and particularly small businesses, to create jobs in our neighborhoods.   We can do this by helping merchants lower their operating costs, through, for example, well-crafted publicly sponsored energy, water, and transportation conservation programs.  Supporting resource-saving efforts helps the environment, and, since most of a dollar saved by a small business is likely to go back into the local economy, spurs job growth in our communities.  And if conservation efforts are undertaken by local enterprises and linked with green job training programs, the circle of goodness is completed.  

Small business, and household, economic activity can also be encouraged by enabling families and businesses to participate in emerging carbon markets, thereby receiving the same economic opportunities as large polluters, as proposed by San Francisco Community Power, www.sfpower.org.  The City could actively engage in public-private partnerships that provide long-term value for neighborhoods, such as creating a family recreation center, or supporting the development of a locally-owned grocery, or energy efficient appliance store, in Bayview.  And, to counter developers’ refrain that they can’t find suitable candidates from the neighborhood to fill construction and other jobs, Bayview and Visitacion Valley hiring halls should be organized, and be directly linked with job training programs and local employers.   

More needs to be done to address chronic joblessness.  Better schools and after school programs and youth and low-skilled worker employment initiatives, to name two.  Over the long term jobs can best be created by self-reinforcing clusters of neighborhood-based businesses that are selling products people want to buy.  Well-crafted City initiatives, that leverage state and federal monies, can serve as essential catalysts for sustainable employment growth that reaches our most vulnerable communities.  


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