San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Old chamber — new vision
As tech takes over, business group adapts
Dusting figures in a wax museum isn’t a typical starting job for business leaders.
But that was how Rodney Fong, the new CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, spent his early years.
Fong’s family operated a wax museum half a block from Fisherman’s Wharf, and the young man would shine props, adjust lighting and remove lint from the figures’ clothing with masking tape wrapped around his hands.
Fong, 53, now needs to dust off something else: The venerable chamber, founded during the Gold Rush,
must adjust to the fast-changing character of the city, as tech companies proliferate and street filth and soaring prices threaten companies large and small.
Fong hears continuously about how crazy street behavior, feces and drug use make workers feel unsafe. The streaming music company Spotify, for example, left its Mid-Market office last year, with former employees saying the move was motivated in part by an assault on an employee near the building.
“We’re going to need every trick in the book to try to solve this problem,” Fong said. He wants the city to increase the number of shelter beds and the availability of mental health services, as well as provide jobs to the homeless.
In the Financial District, the chamber is working to establish a community benefit district, which would collect fees from property owners to pay for street cleaning, security, graffiti removal and traffic control officers. The Board of Supervisors will vote on whether to form the group in July.
Fong, the chamber’s third president in four years, is also wrestling with the rapid spread of tech. The chamber has long defended the interests of old-line corporations such as Wells Fargo and PG&E, advocating on their behalf at City Hall. But with stalwarts Chevron, Bechtel and McKesson disappearing from downtown while Google, Facebook, Salesforce and their ilk take over office towers, the focus is shifting.
Only nine of the 25 largest tech employers in San Francisco, as measured by the San Francisco Business Times, are chamber members. Fong, who joined the chamber in April, is meeting with tech companies to improve those numbers. Recent additions include Facebook, payment startup Stripe and the selfdriving car company Cruise.
“Our alignment with futuristic companies helps us guide policy, helps us guide land use, helps us predict where revenue might come from,” Fong said. “The more that San Francisco can be futurists, the better off.”
One challenge is that tech companies’ priorities may differ from those of other members, said Megan Abell, director of advocacy at TechEquity Collaborative, an Oakland nonprofit that encourages tech workers to engage on civic issues.
“Traditional businesses were looking to the chamber to keep taxes low,” she said. “I would guess that a lot of tech companies care about lower taxes, but they’re also battling issues that extend beyond the city’s border: contractor status, privacy and data.”
Still, taxes are certainly on tech companies’ minds these days. San Franciscans may vote soon on a ballot measure that would tax companies with highly paid CEOs to help pay for free mental health care in the city. A second measure would tax stock-based compensation — a high-profile issue given the string of major companies such as Uber, Lyft, Pinterest and Slack going public.
The chamber has not taken an official position on either measure, but Fong has expressed opposition. The organization energetically opposed Proposition C, a measure approved by voters last year that raised taxes on big businesses to fund homeless programs and divided the tech community.
The chamber supports a proposal to tax net fares of Uber and Lyft rides, because those companies were involved in creating the measure.
“It’s a good example of when our city leaders begin a conversation directly with companies,” Fong told The Chronicle in May. “We get closer to a win-win that way, rather than making assumptions that a company could support that.”
The chamber says it represents more than 2,500 organizations, but it acknowledges that number is overstated, because many of the restaurants and hotels that it counts
actually belong to other trade associations that pay dues to the chamber — not the chamber itself.
A fourth-generation San Franciscan whose great-grandmother was born here in 1898, Fong is the first native to helm the chamber in recent memory. From his corner office in the Russ Building, he can see his now shuttered high school. He lives 12 blocks from his childhood home in the Richmond
District.
In the 1960s, Fong’s grandfather, a Cantonese immigrant, bought an old grain mill near Fisherman’s Wharf. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. Residents of Chinese heritage had only been allowed to own property in San Francisco for two decades at that point, and fishermen, not tourists, still occupied the pier. Then a man who had amassed wax figures during the Seattle World’s Fair went looking for a permanent home for the collection. He approached the elder Fong, who eventually became the sole proprietor of the wax museum.
The attraction passed from father to son, Ronald. Fong’s parents would open souvenir shops, candy stores and a cable car theme ride on the block that includes Jefferson Street, the wharf ’s main drag. Fong recalls his mother, Bev, popping the heads off new wax figures to style their hair and set it with lacquer.
Fong never grew disenchanted with the neighborhood as it morphed from working wharf to tourist hotbed. And he had a role in its revival. In 2005, Fong joined with other local business owners to establish the Fisherman’s Wharf Community Benefit District, designed to improve the wharf and market it.
His roles multiplied. Fong became president of the San Francisco Port Commission, which is responsible for the waterfront, and won approval of the city’s first-ever water taxi service. He then joined the San Francisco Planning Commission, where he supported measures allowing San Franciscans to use their homes for Airbnb and build Castro district in-law units.
He joined boards far and wide: the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank; the Bay Institute; Angel Island Immigration Station; and the San Francisco Travel Association, which represents the city’s largest industry.
In his spare time, Fong enjoys fly fishing with his family. Fong learned the sport from his father, whose father taught him.
But even as he enjoys family time, he worries about the problems that preoccupy all San Franciscans.
“It becomes a concern that your children will be able to afford the city they grew up in,” Fong said.
“Our alignment with futuristic companies helps us guide policy, helps us guide land use, helps us predict where
revenue might come from.”
Rodney Fong, CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce