San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Yang’s line: Bring back fun in NYC
Andrew Yang rolled up for opening day at Yankee Stadium on April 1 with the crackling force field of celebrity surrounding him. Videographers walked backward before him. A small entourage of aides trailed. Fans, lined up for New York’s first professional baseball game with spectators since COVID shut the city, called out, “There’s the next mayor of New York!” and “Good luck!” People milled around to have photos taken with him. Yang bumped elbows and gave highfives; it was the most casual human contact I’d seen in a year.
When I asked Yang supporters why they want him to be mayor, I heard, over and over, variations on the words “change” and “energy.” “He’s young, he’s energetic, he’s a new face,” said Laivi Freundlich, a businessman and synagogue cantor from Brooklyn. “I’m tired of the old guard.” Some associated Yang, in an undefined way, with technological dynamism. “It’s a feeling,” said Thomas Dixon, a 61yearold from the Bronx, about how Yang would “bring about necessary changes. Because like the country, New York City needs to move into the 21st century.”
With 10 weeks until New York’s mayoral primaries, polling shows Yang ahead in a crowded field, though up to half of voters remain undecided. In a survey by Fontas Advisors and Core Decision Analytics in March, Yang was the top choice of 16% of respondents, followed by 10% for Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. (Everyone else was in single digits.)
Yang wants to make New York fun again. He has a platform plank calling for togo cocktails — a pandemic accommodation for struggling bars — to become a fixture of city life. He cheerleads each facet of New York’s postCOVID rebirth. He was there the first day movie theaters reopened, taking his wife, Evelyn, to see a comingofage basketball drama, “Boogie.”
His campaign will soon unveil a new slogan, “Hope Is on the Way.” It is planning events to make up for milestones people lost during COVID, like a prom for high school graduates and maybe even a group wedding at city hall, where Andrew and Evelyn got married, for those who had to postpone their nuptials.
Last week, I had an al fresco dinner with Andrew and Evelyn Yang at a Mediterranean restaurant near their Hell’s Kitchen apartment. He argued there’s a purpose behind his campaign’s celebratory vibe. “We need to get tourists back, we need to get commuters back, we need to get the jobs back online in order for the economy to come back,” he said, adding, “In order for New York City to work, people need to feel safe having fun.”
On one level, the idea of Yang as the mayor — surely one of the most complicated administrative jobs in the country — seems absurd. He has no government experience and has been so detached that he never before voted in a New York mayoral election. Before he ran in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, he founded a midsize nonprofit, Venture for America, that set out to create 100,000 jobs. Vox reported that as of 2019, it had created fewer than 4,000. Nothing in his background indicates an aptitude for running a gargantuan urban bureaucracy at a moment of crisis.
Yet in a traumatized city, people respond to his ebullience. Yang, said Chris Coffey, a campaign comanager, is “giving people hope after a year of death and sadness and Zooms and unhappiness.”
Yang’s politics are pretty conservative, by the standard of a New York Democratic primary. Yang is procharter schools and has criticized the 190,000member United Federation of Teachers for the slow pace of school reopenings. He has slammed Mayor Bill de Blasio for not instituting a hiring freeze and is hesitant to raise taxes on the rich. Yang wants to offer tax breaks to companies that bring their employees back to the office, which those who like the flexibility of remote work might resent.
A number of his plans depend on corporate partnerships. “There’s a lot of potential and pentup energy among companies and leaders in New York who want a mayor they can work with, who want a mayor who’s not going to beat up businesses big and small because they’re businesses,” he told me.
It’s hard to tell whether Yang is leading because of probusiness centrism, or in spite of it. Many backers view him as progressive, particularly those who remember the call for a universal basic income, which animated his presidential campaign. Some supporters don’t think of him in ideological terms at all.
Some leftwing Asian activists hate
Yang’s plan to combat a spike in antiAsian hate crimes by increasing funding for the police department’s Asian Hate Crime Task Force, but there’s no sign that most ordinary Asian Americans voters do. His campaign’s polling shows him winning 49% of the Asian vote, with the other candidates in single digits.
It’s not just Asian American voters who seem excited about the idea of an Asian American mayor. Cynthia Cotto, a 58yearold Black woman who works at Catholic Charities, told me she decided to back Yang after video emerged in March of an Asian man being beaten unconscious on a subway. Supporting Yang “says that we’ve got faith” that not everyone is racist, she said. “That’s why I want him to win.”
Yang makes a point of ignoring progressive social media, where he’s frequently derided as either a neoliberal menace or a clueless tourist. “One of the big numbers that informs me is that approximately 11% of New York City Democratic voters get their news from Twitter,” he said, referring to a figure from his campaign’s internal polling. “If you pay attention to social media you’re going to get a particular look at New Yorkers that is going to be representative of frankly a relatively small percentage of New York voters.”
Still, other candidates hope once they’re able to contrast Yang’s positions and experience to their own, his support will erode. “The vast majority of folks are still saying, ‘I’m trying to make up my mind, I’m trying to get on top of this,’” said mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, a former counsel to de Blasio. “What folks are looking for is not someone who shoots from the hip, but someone who actually has deep plans and policies.”
Wiley’s spokeswoman, Julia Savel, is harsher. “Our city deserves a serious leader, not a miniTrump who thinks our city is a fun plaything in between podcasts,” she said.
Yang has parallels to Donald Trump. He’s a charismatic novice with good branding dominating in a fragmented field. Yang throws out screwball ideas — like putting a casino on parkfilled Governors Island — to see what sticks. He makes gaffes, but they haven’t dragged him down.
Political consultant Jerry Skurnik said of Yang’s lead, “It’s lasted longer than I thought it would, so it might be real.”
In the analysis of John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the city’s politics, unlike the country’s, are still mediated by a thick web of institutional relationships. Yang agrees that this has been true in the past. He just thinks that this time will be different.
California’s fight against climate change isn’t doing all that much to slow climate change. But it should be considered a success anyway.
While California reached its 2020 goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels, it is lagging in meeting its next target — slashing emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.
That’s made California’s climate change regime a target. Environmentalists demand more progress, while conservatives say this failure demonstrates the folly of our onestate fight against climate change.
But to judge California’s climate change policies by greenhouse gas emissions is to get things backward. The Golden State’s fight against climate change is about far more than just climate change.
It’s about all kinds of change. Countering global warming has become the only reliable rationale for doing anything transformational in California. If you have an idea that requires cutting through our governmental dysfunction, crippling legal system, and sprawling fractiousness, invoking climate change is your last, best hope.
In fact, climate is so central to California’s ability to change itself that, if the threat of climate change didn’t exist, Californians would have had to invent it.
When you evaluate California’s fight on what it’s actually accomplished, the picture is extraordinary. Over a generation, climate change has been the most compelling reason for reducing pollution, starting industries, reengineering products, seeding social movements, investing in infrastructure, and revamping regional government.
The state’s pathbreaking capandtrade program forced polluting industries to better measure their emissions, inspired collaborations with other countries, and helped fund California’s highspeed rail project. Climate concerns have forced California’s onceuntouchable electric utilities to handle neglected maintenance, impose preemptive shutoffs to prevent fires, and embrace renewables — especially solar, which provides onefifth of our electricity.
While other places debate whether to adopt renewables at all, California is way ahead in arguing about the mix. How much can we reduce the “carbon intensity” of fuels and thus reduce greenhouse gases when fuels are burned?
Should we really decommission Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo County in 2025, and lose its reliable supply of noncarbon power? Should the geothermal sources of Lake and Imperial counties count as renewables?
Critics of California’s climate change
Countering global warming has become the only reliable rationale for doing anything transformational in California.
fight rightfully point to increasing emissions from transportation. But the transformation of that sector in response to global warming is nevertheless remarkable.
California companies have led in ridesharing and selfdriving technologies — new models that have been sold, in part, as responsive to climate change (thought they also provide greater convenience and mobility for people).
The state has created regulations and incentives to encourage more electric cars, the electrification of bus lines, and more efficient vehicles of all kinds. Planning strategies are reducing the number of miles people drive. And gas stations are now under pressure, too; Petaluma recently voted to prohibit new ones in its city limits.
Progress extends from the local to the global. California has altered the auto industry worldwide. In 2015, it was our state’s regulators who first learned that Volkswagen had designed software to cheat emissions testing on 11 million cars.
Last year, it was California that negotiated agreements with five global carmakers, including Ford, Honda and Volvo, to cut greenhouse gas emissions more than they were required to by the U.S. government — which should seed a new generation of automobiles.
Beyond cars, the fight against climate change has helped planners turn transportation upside down. These days, Los Angeles — of all places — is a national leader in transit, with a fully funded, 50year program for expanding its already robust Metro system of rail and busways.
Bay Area leaders are knitting together existing systems, and promising expansions, including ACE train service connecting San Jose to Modesto and Merced. San Diego County is con
Online at sfchronicle.com/opinion
Read additional commentary, including past pieces you may have missed,. sidering a “5 Big Moves Plan” to create a transportation system as fast and convenient as driving.
Fresno is embracing bus rapid transit — light rail on wheels — and Coachella Valley has launched CV Link, a dedicated transportation system for pedestrians, bicyclists and golf cart drivers between eight cities and two tribal lands.
In California, climate change touches every issue. It has shaken up a California water system that seemed locked in litigation and time, helping to push the state to regulate its groundwater, and to adopt recycling and stormwater capture systems.
Climate change fuels our debates over housing. Many zoning changes supported by the YIMBY, or Yes in My Backyard, movement grow out of climate concerns — they want housing closer to job centers, to reduce commutes and pollution.
California’s schools and universities have modernized curricula as a byproduct of efforts to make the state a leader in climate education.
While the pandemic has inspired emergency investments in public health, telemedicine, and homelessness programs, it will be climate change, and the emergencies it produces, that will justify making those investments permanent.
The bad news is that climate change has contributed to our political polarization. The stakes are now higher — we are fighting for the survival of humanity, and who can compromise on that? The better news is that climate concerns also have ushered in a new era of activism.
The movement to ban hydraulic fracking is a statewide force. Environmental organizations, civil rights groups, and even Black Lives Matter have refocused on how poorer people bear the brunt of both pollution and the higher cost of living related to climate change.
There are more examples — too many for one column. Almost nothing has gone untouched. The bags we use, the straws through which we drink, the mowers we use on our lawns, the native plants with which we’ve replaced those lawns, the crops we grow, the materials with which we repair our homes, the trucks that move those materials — all have been altered by the climate fight.
And we should acknowledge that more.
The saving grace of our desperate struggle to save the world from climate change is the opportunity it provides to change ourselves.
A: B: C:
Which program helped California counties provide housing for the homeless?
A: WeWork
B: Vision Zero
C: Homekey
Salesforce Tower plans to reopen to vaccinated employees in: A: August
B: October
C: May
What is the plan to protect the Bay Area from rising sea levels?
A: Take the sediment from the bay to restore the wetlands
B: Build levees around the Bay Area
C: Ignore the problem
Who is President Biden nominating to serve as the commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection?
A: Steve Rogers
B: Chris Magnus
C: Joe Hill
How much is the U.S. budget deficit?
A: $2 trillion
B: $1.7 trillion
C: $900 billion
Why is the Johnson & Johnson vaccine being halted?
A: Potential link to very rare blood clots
B: Risk of indigestion
C: Reports of super powers
Why are boba tea shops experiencing a shortage?
A: The demand has increased
B: Shipping containers from Asia are delayed
C: The cost of tapioca balls has risen
Stanford medicine is running trials for the Pfizer vaccine at what age range?
A: 12-15 years old
B: 8-12 years old
C: 2-5 years old