potrero view

September 2009

Southeast San Franciscans Continue to Search for Work

By Herman Wong

In July monthly job losses slowed to just under one-quarter of a million, the lowest since last August, and down from a high of almost three-quarter of a million lay-offs in January, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The Federal Reserve declared that “economic activity is leveling out.”  Consumer spending was stabilizing, and the financial markets were finding their equilibrium.  The recession, it appeared, had bottomed-out.  Still, last month The New York Times reported that back-to-school sales are at their worst in more than a decade.  Fear about job loss continues to haunt consumers, keeping them out of stores.

Natasha Miley managed to beat the odds to secure a job in the bad economy.  When the View first spoke with the Potrero Hill resident last spring Miley had been unemployed since the previous fall, when she quit her manager job at a Mountain View biotechnology company. The Stanford graduate had been emailing resumes, lunching with contacts, and working the telephone, with little result.  Her savings were running out, and she’d begun avoiding expensive lattés at cafés.  Change came suddenly.  A recruiter called.  He’d seen her resume posted in the vastness of Monster.com.  Within weeks she was managing projects at Genentech in South San Francisco.  “I can’t believe I was sending resumes out to people, and writing these long, heart-felt, passionate emails to people, and then the way I got this is somebody just called me and I picked up the phone,” Miley said.  She’d held out for a job with a short commute, and now can bike to work.  The company even offers employees inexpensive lattes.  “I have a really good situation right now,” Miley said.  

When Mindy Kener began working at Visitacion Valley’s JobNet two years ago someone told her that unemployment in the neighborhood was 60 percent, and asked if she still wanted the job.  Kener, the program’s senior job developer, believes that the local job situation has improved over the past six months.  JobNet has placed people into training programs for construction and solar panel installation.  Twenty-five newly trained solar installers, many of whom received paid on-the-job instruction, are now waiting for work. “The solar industry is starting to happen.  It’s slow because it’s through the government stimulus money.  So we’re waiting for that money to come in.”  

Terry Anders is similarly optimistic about the future.  Anders is president of the Anders and Anders Foundation, a referral agency with San Francisco’s CityBuild Academy, which trains residents for construction jobs.  His Visitacion Valley-based office is close to a slate of building projects that are projected to create 3,700 construction jobs over the next two decades, according to the Office of the Economic Analysis. The long empty Schlage Lock factory is finally being demolished, with plans to redevelop the land into a mix of new housing and retail space. There are plans to revitalize Leland Street, which is populated by a smattering of small businesses, and to rebuild the Sunnydale housing projects.  “There are some positive aspirations coming to this area that are very needed,” Anders said.  

This month Florence Crittenton Services – which provides child care, mentoring, and job readiness programs – will open the first branch of the City’s One Stop employment office in Visitacion Valley.  The organization has partnered with nonprofit Chinese Newcomers Services Center, which offers free services, such as job preparation and help with income tax filing to immigrants, in a neighborhood where more that half the residents are Asian-American. Susan Murphy, director of Florence Crittenton’s jobs program says she’s seen more Asians attending her job preparation workshops in the last half year, including a woman with a PhD.  “They have to find what other resources are available to be able to put food on the table.  And there’s no shame now because they have to do what needs to be done.”

In Bayview-Hunters Point the recession appears to have added little additional pain to a neighborhood racked by 30 percent unemployment even when San Francisco’s jobless rate – now at about 10 percent – was in the single digits. We would joke that it was already bad in Bayview and that it was just business as usual for people in that community, said FJ Cava, a Bayview resident and owner of the now defunct Bayview Webspot, an Internet café.  “They were already unemployed, so although the recession is hard this is how we live day to day anyway.”

The Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, or Nabe, has long been a resource for the community’s impoverished to look for employment assistance.  But the nonprofit itself is facing lean times. In the first half of 2009 the Nabe lost both its deputy director and jobs coordinator because of funding cuts. The stimulus package brought some jobs to Nabe referrals – cleaning at San Francisco International Airport and for the Department of Public Works – but those were temporary, according to Nabe executive director Edward Hatter.  Green jobs have yet to materialize.  “Education and training is all we can give you right now,” Hatter said.  

Hatter was particularly pained by news that a former Nabe employee and Bayview resident, who’d gone to work as a counselor for the Sheriff’s Department, had been laid off.  “I said wait a minute, not you.  He’d been there for like six years.  He’s done everything right.  He grew up in the neighborhood, he went away to college, he graduated from college, worked in the neighborhood, took a job in the Sheriff’s Department to do more work for the neighborhood, and here he is unemployed, with no real prospects.”


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