primer on business taxes and i'm always available for more detail , either today or at another time. until copy passed in 2012, san francisco levied a one point 5% tax on the payroll bands bends of businesses in the city. the expense is a broad term. think anything accompany pays to its employees, and yes, it will definitely include staff based compensation. the payroll expenses happens in staff based compensation when an employee exercises that options kick the easiest way to think about it is when an employee would receive a w-2 from the company reflecting the income earned from that transaction. our staff, our audit team and our director of compliance is here today and they are very familiar with staff based compensation in the process by which we examined the company has correctly included staff based compensation in their

payroll expense filing as a relatively straightforward, so back to my earlier statement, yes staff option compensation is packed in san francisco, however , as i think many of you have noted, the tax rate is relatively low, currently, the payroll expense tax rate will remain at this rate until there is action taken by the board or voters. so the primary business tax, for most businesses in san francisco is now the gross receipts tax. gross receipts means the total amounts received or accrued by a person or business entity includes all amounts that constitute growth, income for federal income tax purposes. of course, as my attorney was here, you'd want me to give many caveats to that definition, but for the purposes of today, inc. anything a company in his gross

receipt. so it is important for the purposes of the discussion today to understand the gross receipts tax is less directly impacted by a spike in compensation. that is a small but important connection between this compensation and gross receipts. i'm not gonna try to explain how the whole tax is calculated today, you are welcome, but from many businesses, how much employee compensation they have in san francisco does in packed their calculation, so significant change in payroll expense after an i.p.o. is likely to increase the amount of gross receipts taxes a business pays the city, and i will now turn it back to ted to walk you through the numbers. >> thank you, amanda. supervisor mark also asked me to give a little bit of history about local tax policies, and amanda has touched on some of

these details so i will go relatively briefly. as you may know, the city, they had a gross receipts tax and prior to 2,000 which was repealed after a court challenge in 2001, they were later -- they were later attempts during the 2,000 to pass a new tax that was not adopted or did not go on the ballot. instead, with the city did was essentially adopt piecemeal tax policies that address aspects of the payroll tax which was reviewed as unfavourable to businesses in san francisco and those would include the exclusions and clean tax and two exclusions that ultimately spoke to this question of how much payroll tax business would all after an i.p.o. essential market was passed in 2011 that would essentially allow a company to pay only it's

base year payroll and exempt growth in its payroll tax liability for a number of years after the base year provided that it located itself in the central market area. some companies used this exclusion during a period of their initial public offering and likely excluded significant amounts of stock-based compensation his as a result of that. the other one was the prei.p.o. stock compensation that would allow a business anywhere in the city to exclude prei.p.o. stock compensation but not exclude compensation after it went public. in 2012, voters adopted a new business tax system that phase in the gross receipt tax and phase out the payroll tax or reduced the payroll tax to its current rate of 0.8%. this chart illustrates that phase in process, the phase-in

of gross receipts began in 2014. he completed in 2018, so businesses are now paying the maximum tax rates. the payroll tax was set i a formula that the controller charge office calculated during the phase and years, and essentially the payroll tax was only reduced to the extent that overall business tax revenue was unchanged vis-à-vis what it would have been for the old system. essentially the new gross receipts tax does not fully replace what the original payroll tax would have brought in, and therefore the tax rate did not fully phase out. this chart is just indicating what business tax revenue between gross receipts and payroll tax was under our new system, which is indicated in the blue bar, and what it would have been had we not change the business ask, which is indicated

by the orange bar, and it is really just indicating that as intended, the new system is tracking what we would have had under the old system during the phase-in period, and the reason this is relevant to discussion about i.p.o. is there were a number of companies that had i.p.o.s in san francisco during this period. we found 50 companies that have gone public in san francisco since 2011, all of their stock -based compensation would have been taxed at a right of 1.5% and contributed to the benchmark that is reflected by the orange bar, and that is what the new tax system is matching, my combination of phasing in the gross receipts tax and by only phasing out the payroll tax to the extent that we can cover it, to the extent we can ensure revenue neutrality. essentially, the reverence of this slide is that while going

forward, the city does stand to receive less tax revenue associated with i.p.o. because of the reduced payroll tax rate. prior to 2019, we did not lose any business tax revenue. it simply would have gone into preventing the payroll tax rate from declining and i understand this is a confusing question and i'm happy to entertain questions about that at the end of my presentation. when we say revenue neutrality, we don't mean every sector, and this was never the intent of the business tax reform every company or every sector would pay the same. this is a chart indicating that from 2017, what the information sector would have paid under the old system which was around 190 million, and what it did pay under a combination of the remaining payroll tax and new gross receipts tax which is around $165 million. the information sector did save

about 14% from the change and while the information sector was intended or we projected it would have a slightly reduced tax payment, this is a little bit more of a reduction than we had projected in 2012. to speak to two of the tax policies that the city has adopted, and again i'm grateful to the treasurer who has compiled this data on the exclusions every year, i would not have to. >> supervisor fewer: the compensation which is loan joe shown on this slide, as i said before, the prei.p.o. stock competition -- compensation allowed any company to exclude the stock-based compensation that they granted before going public. that was not a very widely used exclusion. on average, one business a year used it, and the average payroll expense tax that the city for gave amounted to about

$1 million a year. the central market, which applied only to businesses along market street and in the tenderloin area was more widely used an average of nine businesses a year, and in each of these cases, certainly in the central market case, businesses used exclusion in multiple years , so these are not necessarily different companies in each year. it is showing the number of employees that were covered in the year that it was filing, and the total payroll expense tax at the city forgo as a result of that. of course, both of these policies were put in place to try and prevent companies from leaving the city. one of the factors of the i.p.o. is that the large, potentially large business tax payment that a business owes to the city, essentially widens the tax difference between a san francisco location and a location in a nearby area that does stock-based compensation. san francisco is the only city

in the bay area bay area that does this compensation. certainly the prei.p.o. compensation was explicitly intended to prevent companies from leaving as a result of having their i.p.o. taxed. in any event, the payroll expense tax that was for gone in central market spiked in the 2014 and 2015 period. that is the period after twitter had their i.p.o. their i.p.o. occurred in 2013. i.p.o. companies have a lockup period in which they disallow their employees from exercising options and selling stock for a period using -- usually six months after the i.p.o. period to prevent a flood of selling of the stock, however, after that period expired, there was a decline in twitter stock price of that time period and there

was, in the year following, a great increase in the payroll tax expense that was forgone in central market markets. and in the year following. so it may very well be that that was done to the effect of the twitter i.p.o. i want to speak to what we have done on behalf or on the topic of the i.p.o.s that we are talking about for 2019, and i would say, echoing that fred had said, several of the i.p.o.s have -- are being talked about or being rumoured. three of them have happened or will happen very soon, and we know this because businesses make a filing with the sec that details what the offering will look like, pinterest has done that and have already had their initial public offering. uber has filed that in it is believed that their i.p.o. would

happen in the next month or so. the others on this list have been rumoured for an i.p.o. and others could be added to the list, but they have not made a filing to this point. our estimates are only based on the three companies that have made an sec filing, basically because we are relying on the data in the sec filing to tell us what the income impacts and the fiscal impact would be of these i.p.o. events. i would say that i do think that this is going to be fairly unprecedented time for san francisco's economy. not however by just the number of i.p.o. we have had 50 already this decade, with the largest i.p.o. that has ever happened in the city of san francisco is twitter , and twitter, if i recall correctly, was worth the low 20 billion-dollar range,. the biggest i.p.o. that has ever

happened is facebook page. and facebook was worth around a hundred billion dollars on the day of its i.p.o. which explains how the housing impact was so big. uber will be bigger than facebook. uber could be four times larger then the largest i.p.o. we have ever seen and seven cisco, and it would be larger than everything else on this list together by far. so that is why, and unfortunately from the perspective of this analysis in one of the reasons they will give you such a wide range of impact is they are the company that we have the least information to date about how many shares are being set aside to fulfil their stock option obligation and what the share price will be. we have made an estimate that on the high-end, uber, about 10% of the market capitalization of uber, a little bit more will be held by their employees. that is a rule of thumb when

we've looked at other companies in the past that have provided detailed information, and they certainly well, they just haven't done it by the date of this hearing. they will do that before they have their i.p.o., with that explains why our range is as wide as it is. let me briefly talk you through the estimate process before i give you the numbers. for each company, of the three that we have the information on from the sec, we looked at how much of their stock will be set aside for employee stock options , restricted stock options and more. essentially much of their stock they need to set aside to fulfil their obligations to their employees. we then need to estimate how much of those shares would be worth to the employee. s1, in many cases detail how much the employees have a cost of exercising the option, but we have to guess what the stock price would be after the lockup period when the employees can start to exercise their options or receive.

that is a major sense of uncertainty, estimating stock prices six months after that period, and i want, i will give you increasing sources uncertainty in our estimates, which i will also explain why it is such a wide range. for revenue purposes, it is always very important to know when you have the money and when you can recognize the revenue. we know very little about when employees choose to exercise their options and when, as amanda said, when an option is exercised, that is the point at which the company is essentially giving the employee a discounted share of stocks and that is compensation, but if, for example, you are a company, you are an employee in a company had an i.p.o., let's say, facebook, and you are very bullish about the stocky stock any thinkable double interest value in three years, you might not want to exercise all of your options as

soon as you can. if you are not optimistic about the future of your company, you might want to cash out your office as soon as you can, but there is uncertainty they're related to the employee's financial strategy and their view about the future value of their options, so for us, we are making an assumption that all of their shares that they are allowed to take as of the date of the i.p.o. will be exercised within a two-year period. that just felt like a safe assumption to us, but we don't have any more details on that, so you should think of these economic impacts and revenue impacts as to your numbers, but there really is no real data behind that assumption. furthermore, these companies, as far as i'm aware of, have employees in places other than san francisco. so we need to make a determination of how much of the stock-based compensation the company will be paying out will

be incurred in san francisco. our payroll tax only applies to payroll expense within the city of san francisco. all of these companies are headquartered in san francisco and it is generally the case that the stock options are more concentrated in the upper echelons of management, so it is likely that the lion his share of the compensation will go to san francisco employees, but that is another source of uncertainty. i have already mentioned the fact that we know less about uber then the other two, and uber is clearly the biggest of the three. with those caveats out of the way, we've estimated the value of the stock-based compensation of these companies with a reasonable estimate of what the stock price might be after the lockup period expires ranging between four and $11.5 billion. at the current payroll expense rate, that would bring them to the city just bring in the city

between 15.1 and $43.5 million of payroll tax revenue. we have also made additional estimates about what that means in the context of the overall economy, which our personal income in the city is over $100 billion and we estimate that that reaches between about a small increase in personal income and that would translate into about a 0.5 to 1.9 income -- increase in housing prices. that is our estimate of the fiscal impacts and the economic impacts of these i.p.o.s, and i'm happy to take any questions that you have at this time. >> thank you very much. thank you for this in the weeds -- i think it is i will have to request a private meeting with you, but my question is, we have seen this and go public and we have seen that stock price be

greatly reduced, and knowing that those shares are greatly reduced, do you think that when uber -- this is just from your personal experience, quite frankly, with uber, with go public, that employees are looking to what happened to lift and that prices got greatly reduced. do you think that would give them more of an incentive to hold onto the stock, more -- or more of an incentive to get rid of them, to sell them? >> i think, apart from my personal experience, and i think they are old -- they are only anecdotes floating around is what i do say is it does seem to be a lot of drama around the initial pricing of the stock and what happens to it in the first couple of days, and i would avoid drawing too much conclusion about that initial pricing and what happens in the first couple days, for example,

the last time i checked, lift stock was significantly below what the company had initially priced it at, and after it went public, it spiked up and out has spiked back down. it is hard to say for sure that fundamental factors in the company are driving those fluctuations in stock prices, and what we are interested in and in estimating this is what is it going to be worked at the end of the lockup period? it is entirely possible that the stock may stabilize at some level that is higher or lower than where it is today, and in six months, and i would avoid placing too much credence in what you see in the very early days of the company going public of course, 20 years ago during the.com boom, you would have companies that went public, skyrocketed on their first day, and never reach that price again and they were bankrupting two

years. that doesn't seem to be the experience with most of the companies that have gone public in san francisco this decade. twitter had a spike after its i.p.o. it has gone off -- up and down. it reacts to news and fundamental changes in its business just like in every other company. i think it is very hard to draw conclusions based on the period right after the i.p.o., and i think if i was and uber employee , i would be very cautious drawing conclusions about my company based on what our biggest competitor is doing. what we are looking at, which provides some level of guidance, is the option prices of stocks. six-month into the future, but again, it fluctuates very much. it is certainly no simpler for us looking at it from the outside than it is to anyone on the inside. >> okay. i think that there are legislators here sitting here trying to figure out how soon this might come down and how fast it might come down, and how

big it is, that is the question, and that is why i asked. i know what it is like to get into the minds of people, and everyone who is an individual, but i didn't know there was some historical pattern about how people think about their shares and their stocks, and i think that is to do with many factors, age, where they are financially, personal, just whatever, but i thought there might be some historic information. >> i could speak to the twitter experience, to the extent we can read it from what is public information about the tax exclusion. the 2014 spike that we saw there where it would have been 30 something million dollars had twitter stayed in the city to pay it is always the proviso, but that gives us an insight on how much compensation was involved. that would have covered about seven or eight months post lockup period, and then there was a lot more in the next year, and if you take the amount from both of those years and compare

it to what the twitter f1 says they have set aside for the companies, it is pretty close with a reasonable price of the stock after six months. it is pretty close, and so that leads me to conclude that at least in twitter's case, based on the public information, most of the stock-based compensation that was set aside prior to the i.p.o. wound up being realized in a two year period, and that is not a lot of data points to base my assumption on, with that is the basis for my assumption of the two years. >> thank you. >> any other clarifying questions? supervisor madeleine -- madeleine -- >> thank you for calling for this hearing, thank you for officers of the b.l.a. and the controller's office for putting a lot of work into this.

it seems it is interesting and troubling to see the data from the first presentation around what i think we know about increasing inequality and that divides, and then hearing your presentation and getting a sense of the actual scale of what might be coming down is also chastening. since you are here and since i was not here in 2012 and don't know what kinds of conversations were had and the tenor of the conversations about the toxic 12012 time, the city guarantees baseline assumptions where you want to talk to the form, and we want to stimulate job just come out is a job killer you want a

kind and that is not going to discourage -- discouraged discourage jobs from being in san francisco. obviously, seven years later, we inhabit a very different universe right now we are we have this incredible and growing income inequality, significant unmet public needs, certainly the public sector falling behind and smoothing off the edges of our market economy, san francisco and throughout the bay area, so i have heard, not as much recently, but i have heard some business community who have suggested that this decline in payroll tax the fact that there still some payroll tax left is a problem from their perspective in terms of their understanding

of what we agreed on 2012 and that we would need -- we need to have a conversation that is eliminating that payroll tax, and in some ways, a dozen years later, payroll tax, particularly as it impacts hiring earners kind of makes a lot more sense in this moment, it seems like, but is there a need to eliminate that final payroll tax chunk? >> i would not speak to it as a need to, but i would just remind you, particularly since you weren't on the board in 2012, that you are trying to achieve a number of objectives with the replacement of the payroll tax and the gross receipts tax, we sometimes talk about the criteria as the eaves criteria,

and i have been in this since he -- city since 20 -- 2007, when we did the gross receipts switch in 2012. that had already been my third time trying to do business tax reform, and i came in in the middle. the city has been doing this since 2002, so we were rehearsing when we are deciding whether we wanted to replace the payroll tax and replace it with different tax options that are legal in california, that might have better effects on the economy, on administration, on the equity of the tax cate in terms of the gross receipts tax switches by far the most popular business tax among california cities, it was very clear that it could be more equitable then the payroll tax which is a flat tax and evernote -- new gross receipts tax has a progressive structure. there is pretty good reason to believe that it would be more

stable, in one of the reasons it would be more stable as it is it doesn't have that stock-based compensation, direct component directly and it. we knew it would be much harder to administer, and again, thanks for not the first time to the treasury office for all the work the past years grappling with the new tax, and we also had reason to believe that we had outside consultants incur on this that it would be less economically damaging to the economy then the payroll tax, and in the space that every dollar of tax that you raise, how many jobs are you costing? and the payroll talks -- tax had been derived as a job killer. there's some economic evidence, and i think some reason to believe that that is true. when we did an economic impact report on the switch, i recall our projection was with the city might gain 2500 jobs a year as a

result of the switch. even if that were true, the city has seen 170,000 jobs since then , so i don't think the tax is particularly meaningful in accomplishing that, but i think to speak of, do we need to reduce or eliminate the payroll tax, it kind of goes back to the policy question of how important are those categories for you. if there is a belief that, you know, in 2012, which the everything i should mention about the 2012 tax is it did represent a net revenue gain for the city. we kept the tax revenue, will be increased -- was neutral but we increase the license fee by about $30 billion. essentially the switch from a less efficient to a more efficient tax allowed us to create some jobs and added more revenue. if the policy calculation is different now and we would like to have even more revenue, and

even less jobs, or maybe we are willing to tolerate the decline of jobs at the expense of revenue, i think that is a policy choice, but i don't think that privileges the payroll tax versus the gross receipts tax. i still think if you are saying, well i am willing to lose 1,000 jobs a year from a business tax increase, you would get more revenue by raising the gross receipts tax to cost 1,000 jobs than you would by raising the payroll tax to cost 1,000 jobs because it is still a more efficient tax. in 2012 we were saying we were looking at it from the perspective of how many jobs do we lose for every dollar that we gain. if you hold the number of jobs constant and you want to make sure that for every job you lose you get as much money as possible, then i thank you are still with the gross receipts tax because, you know, in the same wave that for every dollar you gain from the payroll tax

you are more -- at more risk of losing jobs, for every job used -- lewis, you actually get less revenue, and again, i apologize for doing math on the fly without a whiteboard, but that is my view of it. >> i think i will probably invite you to come and bring your whiteboard into my office and explain this a little bit. if is to ask questions. the payroll tax is not necessarily a flat tax. >> it is not necessarily, but it is a flat tax. >> legally doesn't have to be a flat tax? >> no. >> i would be interested in knowing, given what we have seen today about income inequality, and given what we have seen about the increase in jobs, and the ever end of the spectrum, if you were thinking about how much payroll tax to retain and where we should be collecting it from, it would seem like, and one of the things that maybe as appealing about some kind of

something that brings in the i.p.o. is that it feels a little bit like, i mean it is going after the wealth. it is not it in income tax but has some of the, i'm wondering how close we can get, i guess that is the legal question. >> i can tell you from my personal experience of working on the various iterations of business tax reform, in 2010, our process led to two options for decision-makers. one of which became legislation, and that was a progressive payroll tax. it would have charged a higher payroll rate two employees making over $85,000 at -- at the time, and the board did not move forward with that, but that was legislation that was approved. >> all right, that is exciting to me. i guess i am trying to, i guess my last question that from 2012

to now in terms of winners and losers, let's bring up context and the increase -- the increase in the gross receipts tax, but then other folks, some folks in the business community believe there is lingering unfairness in our existing gross receipts system and that we ought to be looking at -- i've also heard some of their are those businesses that aren't really touched very much by the tax, even i think services, even if -- and i probably need to delve more further into this, but is there a need for some additional tinkering with the 2012 compromise -- from use -- from what you've seen, to address these issues? >> as a representative, i would avoid the word need, but i would say that people often ask me, where did these rates come from?

and i described the process that we undertook with hundreds of businesses who came to the meetings that we did in 2012 and we got to a consensus on rates across the industries that people felt they could live with at the time. i don't know how people feel about that now. we have not engaged in that process since then. >> thank you. supervisor stefani? >> thank you. i'm not very good at math, i will say that, it appears to me that you and the b.l.a. have very different projections on housing prices based on these initial, or these potential i.p.o.s, and looking at your last slide, which is just a one-point nine increase, and then page 3 of the b.l.a. report which adjusts an 11.3% increase, and i'm trying to understand the different projections and whether or not i am actually

seeing that correctly. >> you are seeing it correctly, and i think, you know, the overriding answer to your question is that no one knows, and so what we have -- i don't know, the b.l.a. doesn't know, nobody knows, which is why everyone has been doing it in different ways. when we don't know, we say there actually is no data on which people got how much money after which i.p.o., how many of them lived in a certain place and bought a house in that place and how much did the housing prices go up after that. i think one of the differences between our approach in the b.l.a. is first, we're only looking at the three i.p.o. that we know about, we're not looking at the six or seven potential i.p.o., and we are trying to route our estimate and what we know or think we can reasonably guess about the amount of income that will be brought into the city's economy as a result of that.

the relationship between the growth and income that we have projected and housing prices is based on statistical models that we have of housing prices and income growth in the city economy and it is just a typical change in housing prices given that amount of income. it is not based on any kind of i.p.o. event, and i don't want to go into too much more detail on the ucla study or any of the other approaches, i just know that the way we did it was most rooted in what we know about these individual companies, and most traditional in terms of it is an income shock to the city atop economy and what does that mean for housing prices given what we know about income growth and housing prices in the city previously. >> okay. when you were looking at the three potential i.p.o., the one with the s.c.c. filings, i just want to make sure i have this correct. to the estimated impacts of the housing costs from that round, those rounds of i.p.o.s are less then a couple of percentage

points? >> it is between 0.5 and 1.9 on the city. >> okay. thank you. >> great. thank you, again for the presentation. i just had a few questions before we move to public comment and i see we have a few speaker cards collected. so, i think your presentation highlighted the remarkable growth of the tech sector in san francisco over the past decade and to the point where it is the dominant industry in our city right now i most measurements, and i think it also highlighted how this growth of the sector would feel at least -- was fuelled by tax breaks that were granted or targeted at tech companies to keep them here and have -- allow them to grow over the past decade.

i have a few questions about that and then you referenced the twitter i.p.o. that happened during this period, and that is the most significant, the largest i.p.o. that has happened in san francisco and a really important point of reference if we are trying to understand how this current i.p.o. earthquake is going to play out and impact our city. [please stand by]

map -- >> supervisor mar: compared to the previous tax that would have been in place at 1.5%. >> so if we were to assume that they were all going forward, and nothing who would change -- would have changed except the payroll tax rate, the variance there between what they would pay at the current rate is 42 to 122 million. >> supervisor mar: 42 -- >> 42 to 122 million, based on their stock options, and that's two-year figure. >> supervisor mar: and that's

what they would be saving compared to what they paid in 2012? >> with a 1.5% rate. >> supervisor mar: yeah. i don't have any other comments. i'm going to move onto public comment. it looks like i have 17 speaker cards. i'm going to call names in groups, and if you hear your name called, step up to the right of the group and step up to the microphone. the first group is kyung fang, emily lee, leticia arca, shumin lee, and john harris.

>> good morning, supervisors. my name is kyung fang. i want to thank supervisor mar for your leadership on this issue. we know this crisis, we feel this crisis. i walk and get on b.a.r.t., and it's packed. i can't even move. that's because there's so many commuters of people who are being pushed out further and further. i walk down the streets. i live in the tenderloin, and i have to walk over the bodies of people living in the streets. there in the richest city, where there's 100 billion of venture capital flowing in. i think it's time that it's

clear to do something about this, it's time to turn the city around. it's time to make sure that san francisco leads, not in this inequality, uber inequality, but in racial equity, gender equity. that's why i'm here today. there are over a dozen groups here in the room with us along with our coalition, and all of our groups here, worker groups, community groups, agree that it's time to do something. and we are the 99%. we are the restaurant workers, we are the uber drivers, we are the people who actually create a successful city, and it's time for us to share in the wealth. thanks. >> supervisor mar: thanks. next speaker, please. >> thank you, supervisors, for calling this hearing and for asking these really good questions. i think again, just to reiterate, i think we've all seen -- anybody who's been in san francisco the last 10 or 20 years, you've seen the impact,

the ridesing inequality in our city, and i think it's illustrated every day with the folks we work with. my name is emily lee. i work with rising alliance. we work with nonprofits across the city in the soma, tenderloin, bayview. we're across the city seeing the impacts, where rising inequality, it's obvious to us. we don't need statistics to tell us these i.p.o.s are going to impact our communities. we're already feeling the impact. rising crisis, rising housing crisis. when people come to us and tell us, i can't afford to live in san francisco anymore, i'm squeezing more family members in to make ends meet, or i'm taking more jobs. 1 in 28 school kids in san

francisco are homeless. they're couch surfing, they're out on the streets, they're sleeping in shelters. we see this at city college and s.f. state. we have stories of students who are college students who are basically not able to eat three meals a day. they are basically sleeping in their cars, so the reality is this impacts the city and impacts the families that we serve. this is a real question, how are we going to deal with this inequality? how is san francisco going to rise to the challenge and this moment of i.p.o. and massive wealth influx? what is san francisco going to do to lead the way? i think we really are hopeful that san francisco can show the rest of the nation how these i.p.o.s should be -- >> supervisor mar: thank you. next speaker, please. >> hi. my name is john harris. i'm born and raised in san

francisco, north beach, chinatown. i was featured on channel 4 kutv has a city and county employee as a full-time employee that's homeless. i lived in a next door shelter for 2.5 years on polk street -- for over 2.5 years. the policy is you can stay there for three months, and then two months, you would have to leave and come back. so during that time, i slept in my car in the tenderloin. i also slept in a church parking lot where i mopped the floors and things like that for the church and they let me sleep in my car in the parking lot. i took care of my mom for, like, eight or nine years, and once she passed away three years ago, i became homeless. and some people that worked for the city and county gave me the opportunity to work for them,

and i've been there ever since. i'm a temp exec. my union's fighting for me to become a full-time civil service because they don't understand why for 2.5 years, i'm a full-time temp exempt. they'd tell me if you sign this paper saying you have mental problems, psychological problems, then, we can help you. i refused because i'm not going to lie just to get a place to live. let me see. did i leave out anything? yeah, that's basically my story. >> supervisor mar: thank you. next speaker, please. >> i want to thank john for that really powerful, personal

testimony. i hope everyone was listening, and the media was listening to the reality that our folks are living in. good morning, supervisors. my name is chiffon lu. i'm here to share some of the voices of my organization. we represent fong, the restaurant worker working multiple jobs trying to represent her daughter. i represent huang, who is living in a house with other families. i'm representing high school students, some of whom struggle with mental health, anxiety and health issues but are not able to get assistance because of all the cultural barriers and

the fact that they are facing so much pressure at home from their immigrant working parents who came to this country in order for them to be able to go to school so they better succeed in school. these are some of the folks that i represent, folks on -- in school who i now represent. every day, watching the news, feeling there's no way they're going to be able to return to the city. san francisco is already in devastation in so many communities, working communities of color. our city deserves working neighborhoods, thriving neighborhoods, not just struggling to survive. this earthquake that supervisor mar referred to is only one of the many crises we have to deal

with, and we hope -- >> supervisor mar: thank you. next speaker, please. >> hi. good afternoon. my name is leticia, and i'm here with just cause. i we work with black and latino families in the city trying to stay in their homes. i'm here at today's hearing to speak about the impact that will be had on me as a resident in san francisco and i community members that i work with every day fighting to stay in this city. what i know is that people are struggling, and it's not getting any easier. what i learned today is that this already happened, and it's going to happen again. i'm concerned about the negative consequences that we will -- that we'll all feel. i'm constantly worried about my landlord selling her property and what that would mean for me and my future in this city. the reason why so many of us are worried is because we know we'll be unable to compete with

those making so much more money than we make. i'm worried about the low-income seniors and families that are struggling that i work with to meet those most basic needs, and meeting those basic needs when everything keeps going up, and wages are, like, stagnant. i'm worried about how much more worse things can get, how many more families will face evictions and how many more families will end up on the streets. the people i work with are janitors, caregivers, hotel workers. we look to you, our elected officials to take concrete steps to address this wealth gap, and to ensure that whatever wealth is generated by this i.p.o. helps everyone in the city prosper.

thank you. >> supervisor mar: thank you. next speaker, please. >> hello. my name is erica martinovic. when the central market street and payroll tax also known as the twitter tax break was created in 2011, it was meant to keep twitter to revitalize the downtown area. did it keep its perspective? our opinion is no. we witnessed families living in soma being harassed and threatened by landlords to move out, we witnessed iris canada being evicted from her home that ultimately ate up her

health and led to her death. we witness people losing their homes and ending up homeless or fleeing out further from the bay area just so that he can have a roof over their head. in a time that california's income inequality and housing crisis, we ask our elected officials to step up. we need to see real mitigation from these companies to contribute to the burden that they will cause to our seniors, immigrants, and working class communities. thank you. >> supervisor mar: thank you. next speaker, please. >> good morning. my name is taylor bossa, also with somcan.

some tenants respond to pressure like so many of our former neighbors by voluntarily packing up and moving to elsewhere that is friendlier to middle class and working class people. others double down and bring in more family, unable to move from their resident even if they wanted to. growing up is not ideal for child, for any senior or anyone. we have clients who have applied for b.m.r. over a dozen times with no luck. housing is a right. san francisco has become a playground for the obscenely rich with no room for anyone who makes less than $150,000 annually. it used to be a place of culture and diversity where people can grow up and dream of growing old, but now it's a shadow of its former self-.

income inequality is at an all time high. companies can and should pay their fair share for operating in san francisco. the city is what it is because of the great diverse working class communities, folks of color and folks who call it home. the tech wave and influx of millionaires is not accidental. this again points to the question who is it benefiting? these private corporations enrich a few while displacing many. we urge the board to counteract these impacts. >> supervisor mar: thank you. next speaker, please. >> good morning. my name is jennifer esteen. i'm a registered nurse for the city of san francisco. i'm here at a -- as a public

citizen and seiu 1021. when we talk about equity, we can't just talk about equity for businesses, we have to talk about equity for all. i heard the budget analyst -- which sounded like he had a more understanding of what actual issues, gross inequality expanded through this city. many could be invested in the city, services and infrastructure which were the recommendations that came from the budget analyst's office. we see incomes are falling for service workers, we have more and more workers become be temp exempts. in san francisco general hospital alone, there's 1 million hours of work last year by temporary nurses. having the city's only level one trauma center staffed by

temporary nurses is insane and it's unsafe. divert general diverted 65% -- san francisco general diverted 65% of the time. the city has to pay full price for those same people to be treated at other hospitals. 130% of the time last month and the month before, san francisco general hospital ran above capacity. 130% of the time. that means that patients could not be adequately treated in the units they're supposed to be seen in. i.c.u. patients had to be boarded in the wrong area. if we leave money sitting on the table because we want to attract workers, how can we take care of the people that are already here? let's not lose sight of the fact that san francisco exists and will exist. do the right thing. >> supervisor mar: thank you. next speaker, please. >> i'm a resident of san francisco for close to 45

years. i couldn't help but notice that in presentations that the corporations, and the city, what we get from them, is millions, so i wonder -- the huge gap there. i wonder, could there be a hearing that explains to all of us what the community benefit of that growth or that stability of having those companies in the city? what are we actually getting when we can't tax these property taxes compared to what we have lost and will continue to lose? our community, the diversity in the city, all of the things that built this city and made this city so attractive to these companies, and we're not the beneficiaries of that.

with the low numbers of people of color and diversity in their employment, i would suspect that the jobs didn't come from our community. i have a son born in san francisco general hospital 40 years ago. he lives in south san francisco. he's unemployed, and an unemployed tech employee at the moment. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker, please. >> thank you, supervisor mar, for your leadership on calling for this hearing. this is definitely very important. my name is shen lee, and i'm with seiu 1021. i'm speaking as a long-term resident of this city. i've been here 26 years, currently living in a rent