SPUR scenario envisions a better San Francisco
Science fiction was never my thing, but it’s impossible to resist scanning the horizon. The urban planning nonprofit SPUR has issued “Four Future Scenarios for the San Francisco Bay Area,” a briefing paper about what the region will be like in the year 2070.
In “Gated Utopia,” life is good for the people who live here, “but our collective choice not to expand the housing supply nor make investments in other public forms of social support” means that everyone who isn’t wealthy has been pushed out. The African American population and immigrant communities are mainly gone and the area isn’t suitable for working- and middleclass folks.
In “Bunker Bay Area,” “manicured, highly protected neighborhoods are surrounded by slums.” This is a situation similar to that in Latin American cities, “where the poorest and the richest inhabit distinct worlds right on top of one another.”
In “Rust Belt West,” antibusiness sentiment, as well as increased taxes and regulations, have resulted in businesses relocating, and we have “become somewhat of an economic backwater. As in Italy, our population grows older as younger people leave to find opportunity elsewhere.”
But what’s over there? Is that a ray of light I see?
In “A New Social Compact,” shared prosperity has led to improvements in housing, transit, education and other public services. Walking and biking are encouraged. Rich people have become philanthropists and invest in the area; they have raised taxes on themselves to “bring about a high quality of life for people regardless of their income level.”
I’m swept away by this utopian vision: no more road rage, no more poor people suffering, no more garbage on the streets. Global warming has cooled down and potato chips have been engineered to have the calorie counts of carrots. That’s the world we want our great-grandchildren to inherit.
Word arrived last week of Safr, “the new women-only ridesharing service solely focused on the safety and empowerment of women.”
The press release touting this innovation — to make its debut in San Francisco, as well as Boston, Orlando, Atlanta, Dallas and Washington, D.C. — says that the service was created as a response to “recent sexual assault allegations on drivers of other ridesharing companies,” that the drivers are carefully vetted, rides are monitored by real-time tracking devices and “riders and drivers are permitted to preselect the gender of their driver-passenger.”
The release also claims that “every time you ride with Safr, you are helping to empower a like-minded driver and support women, children, animals and communities.” Animals? That’s through charities that will get a portion of the proceeds, said company rep Kelly O’Shea.
As to the “children,” she’s envisioning that many of the drivers will be “stay-athome moms” who will have freedom to schedule their working hours around their children’s schedules. It’s also hoped that women will serve as entrepreneurs, growing the company by creating franchises. On the other hand, the drivers are gig employees, with no benefits and no sick days for taking care of ailing kids.
In 1967, while the war in Vietnam was raging, Tom Miller, who was practicing law in New York, read a report by Martha Gellhorn about the effects of napalm on the Vietnamese, especially children. He left his New York law practice to become a founder of Children’s Medical Relief International, a nonprofit with the aim of establishing a hospital in Vietnam.
By 1969, after two years of operation in temporary headquarters, Miller and physician and Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran Arthur Barsky had overseen the construction of the Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, a modern medical facility that treated victims of bombing and napalm, as well as children born with birth defects as a result of the use of Agent Orange. It was that center that treated Kim Phuc, the girl pictured running from her burning village during the war.
In 1973, Miller was working with victims in Vietnam when he met Tran Tuong Nhu. They were married that year. (And she later became press secretary to Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown.) They’re planning to travel to Vietnam next spring to mark the 50th anniversary of the center, and are raising money through the Green Cities Fund to buy equipment and support for what’s become a national teaching hospital.
The facility recently expanded from two floors to 11, one of which will be dedicated in honor of Miller.
“My goal this summer is not to learn anything. I don’t want to know any more at the end of this summer than I did at the beginning.” Young woman to man, overheard near Boston Common by Steven Short