As San Francisco embarks on elaborate festivities for Super Bowl 50 this week, some in the city are not in a mood to celebrate.
Activists on a range of economic and social issues see the opening of Super Bowl City, a multi-stage event space on the city’s scenic Embarcadero, as a symbol of how San Francisco has lost its way. Known since the 1960s for its left-wing politics and bohemian bent, the city today is in danger of becoming just another playground for the rich, they say.
Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco director of counseling Tommi Avicolli Mecca said he hates seeing San Francisco, which is already facing a US$100 million budget shortfall, spending an estimated US$5 million in taxpayer dollars to host events leading up to Sunday’s Super Bowl.
Photo: AP
“The administration does not care about the poor and working class people, and is only concerned about giving the rich somewhere to have a party,” Avicolli Mecca said, adding that San Francisco rental rates have become unaffordable for many middle class people and that homelessness is rampant.
A spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee did not return calls seeking comment, but his office has said the city would more than make up for its expenditures through hotel and other taxes. While the bowl is to be played in Santa Clara in nearby Silicon Valley, California, the city is to accommodate many visitors and most pre-game events.
San Francisco Chamber of Commerce president and chief executive Bob Linscheid said that affluence and poverty exist uncomfortably side-by-side in San Francisco, but said any blame cast on the Super Bowl is misplaced.
San Francisco is hosting the “most philanthropic Super Bowl in the game’s history,” Linscheid said, adding that the city would more than recover its costs through spending by visitors at local businesses.
The charity arm of the non-profit Super Bowl 50 Host Committee has pledged to donate US$13 million to local charities that benefit Bay Area children and young adults living in low-income communities.
Conflict over the Super Bowl is rooted in dramatic changes in San Francisco’s demographics, partly driven by the super-charged growth of prosperous technology companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Apple and Facebook. Highly-paid workers willing to pay top dollar for housing have flocked to the city of about 840,000 people in recent years, driving the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment to more than US$4,600, according to Zumper, an online apartment rental company.
The philanthropy promised by Super Bowl planners has not convinced activists that the event is a good fit with San Francisco. They have planned a range of demonstrations, including a march that took place on Saturday to protest the killing by police officers of a young, black stabbing suspect and an upcoming rally by Bloodstained Men and Their Friends, an anti-circumcision group.
A protest on behalf of the homeless is planned for tomorrow near Super Bowl City. The area is ordinarily populated by many homeless San Franciscans, but, in recent days, they have been far less visible on streets near the Embarcadero.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS