Reporting Live From San Francisco

It's easy for me to quip, like many other bloggers, about San Francisco being a haven for socialist ideas that eventually find their way into our governing bodies. This tendancy leads many to give charming nicknames like the U.S.S.R. (Union of San (Francisco) Socialist Republics), etc. to my beloved city.

San Francisco's geography and natural beauty in combination with some of its composition, in my undaunted and humble opinion, sits on the top shelf in comparison to all of the cities in the world: rolling hills (on the east coast or in the midwest you'd call them mountains), victorian buildings, the Golden Gate Bridge touching the sky while spanning across the horizon, world class restaurants that are more numerous than a Baldwin sponsered bunny farm, a center for the world-wide entrepreurship and men sporting lipstick and dresses.

On the other hand, the combination of the above increases the average citizen's threshold for pain inflicted by an extremely incompetent and controlling government; and nothing embodies the "dumbshit/yellow bellied politician" label quite like our board of supervisors. Here's the latest:

The owners of the Fairmont Hotel, the San Francisco landmark that offers sweeping views of the city from atop Nob Hill and has been embroiled in a bitter labor dispute with union workers, said Monday they want to turn nearly half of their posh rooms into condominiums.

The proposal immediately caused a furor among city leaders, so much so that today the supervisor whose district includes the Fairmont plans to introduce a measure that would ban large hotels from making such conversions.

"Turning the Fairmont into luxury condos would be like turning the Eiffel Tower into an office building," said Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin. "It's not the Fairmont Condo Tower. It's the Fairmont Hotel."

The owners, a group of individual investors including Oakland A's owner Lewis Wolff, say their proposal is in the very early stages. Heather Castellari, vice president of asset management for the group, said owners want to convert a 23-story tower that is annexed to the hotel into residential housing, likely condominiums.

As the article states, the Fairmont Hotel is indeed a historic landmark in the city. The United Nations charter was signed by Harry Truman there and, even though it was under construction at the time, it was one of the few buildings left standing after the 1906 earthquake. Aaron Peskin, through a dashing use of hyperbole, compared converting the Fairmount to renovating the Eiffel tower, even though the last time I checked, the Fairmont Hotel is private property while the Eiffel tower is not.

Seeing this through a libertarian-ish view, I'm at a loss trying to see how legislation could be passed to prevent this from happening. The portion of the Fairmont that they are looking to renovate isn't even part of the historic building, it is the tower that was added in 1961, and if you didn't know better, you probably wouldn't think they were the same building. Without the historical society involved, how can the local government step in and force their will on a private business? I don't think emminent domain would be an issue here, but I am clearly not an expert on that issue.

Converting a landmark is not the issue here; Pesking is sticking up for the labor unions who have been fighting for their lives against the Fairmont. Peskin says, "Frankly, it's not about wages and benefits. This is about the Fairmont Hotel remaining the Fairmont Hotel." This shouldn't be a teleolgical argument; its about economics and property rights. Housing, not hotel space, is a premium in the city, and the free market should be able to decide this issue, not a local supervisor with his pockets lined by the labor unions.

Oh well, at least the men still wear lipstick.