AsianWeek

S.F. Supes Meet in Chinatown
With district elections in mind, City Hall comes to the community
By Perla Ni

In a stepped-up effort to bring City Hall closer to its communities, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Monday broke their routine to meet in a much different time and place than usual.

Some 100 people packed the cafeteria at John Yehall Chin Elementary for the 6 p.m. meeting, which officials said was the first held in Chinatown. Welcoming speeches and entertainment seemed to be first on an unofficial agenda, with dancing first graders persuading lawmakers to join them on stage for a quick twist.

"It's a great honor for the Board of Supervisors to come to this neighborhood and this community," said Supervisor Leland Yee as he welcomed the audience. Alumnus Eddie Chin, now a school board member, commended Yee and others for taking the effort to reach out. "We are very happy you have chosen to come to the neighborhood," he said.

Supervisors Yee, Mark Leno and Gavin Newsom gathered an hour before the meeting for a walking tour, beginning at the brightly-colored Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), which sponsored the event. Plenty of sweet photo-ops were to be had: Among the stops was the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Co. on Russ Alley, where the lawmakers sampled some fresh tidbits before heading for the school on Broadway.

Eventually, the meeting did take a sobering turn as residents voiced concerns about Chinatown's and North Beach's longstanding problems, such as traffic congestion.

"Not even my own kids want to come to Chinatown" because of traffic problems, said Fung Lee, president of the CCBA, commonly known as the Six Companies. No alternative, he said, has yet been proposed that would give tourists the same kind of access they enjoyed through the now-demolished Embarcadero Freeway, damaged almost a decade ago in the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Lee also called on supervisors to dispatch more patrols to Chinatown in the evening, saying fears about safety are why "businesses are closing at 6 p.m."

Though such problems weren't solved Monday, the board unanimously passed a resolution urging Mayor Willie Brown, labor unions and other groups to declare the first day of the Lunar New Year an official city holiday. That day rotates annually, but generally occurs in February.

"Since the Lunar New Year is a holiday for school children, the fact that parents are working presents child care issues," said Yee, saying that the holiday designation would be the right thing to do. Giving workers the day off would "let parents to be home with kids and talk about the importance of the Lunar New Year," said the supervisor.

Monday's meeting, a far cry from the board's regular 2 p.m. City Hall venue, reflects in part the new politicking required under district elections, set to resume in 2000. The next off-site meeting, planned for March 29, is to be held South of Market to reach out to neighborhoods in that area, including the thousands of Vietnamese Americans and others in the Tenderloin.

"In the wake of district elections, we're all eager to meet the community," Yee said. Under the system, last in place in the 1970s, supervisors will be elected on a district-wide, rather than a citywide basis. That could magnify Asian American impact in certain districts of the city.

Asian American voting participation also has implications for the longer term and beyond San Francisco, itself one-third Asian American. The Chinese American Voter Registration Committee, which held its voter registration kickoff earlier Monday, now predicts that while the percentage of black San Franciscans will remain steady, the numbers of Asian Americans will surpass those of whites by 2017, and that the Latino population will do so by 2040.

As part of an evolving strategy, the veteran nonprofit has expanded its focus not only to sign up new voters but to educate them about what and whom they're voting for. David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voter Education Committee, said he hoped that better public education and media coverage of civic issues, especially those relating to education and the economy, will enable Chinese Americans "to make the connection between voting and real life."

Asian American voters in the city know little about district elections themselves, according to a recent Solem & Associates survey. Fifty-one percent of those polled were not aware that San Francisco would soon implement district elections, and 24 percent didn't know what district elections were. Less than a fourth-24 percent-of the voters polled said they were aware of the coming change.

Such numbers worry CAVEC's David Lee, who said that Chinese American voter registration stands at only 16 percent, far below their share of the population, and that many don't make it to the polls. Despite his group having added 10,000 new Chinese American voters last year, he said "non-Chinese are doing much better than Chinese in terms of voter registration."

How many Chinese Americans vote is expected to make a significant impact in District 3 (which includes Chinatown), Districts 1 and 4 (the Richmond and Sunset, respectively) and District 11 (which includes the Excelsior). The question has implications beyond San Francisco as well. In Alameda County, predicts the group, Asian-American population share will surpass that of whites by 2023 and Latinos are expected to reach that point by 2030. Moreover, in Santa Clara County, Asian population share is expected to be larger than that of whites before 2020, with Latinos to follow shortly after.

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