Using “blight” as a corporate welfare ruse

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Is this blight? The SF Mart at 9th and Market is included in the expanded definition of the distressed "Mid-Market Area"

www.sfmart.com

The proposed Twitter tax break is about helping what the Chronicle calls the “long-blighted Mid-Market area,” right? Well then why, a couple of astute Guardian readers ask, does it extend all the way to 9^th Street, where politically connected landlord Alwin Dworman wants Twitter to move into his sprawling SF Mart building?

While some Guardian blog commenters have indignantly challenged claims by other commenters that the mid-Market area isn't “blighted,” the fact is that most definitions of the distressed mid-Market area extend only from 5^th to 7^th streets and adjacent blocks to the north and south. That was the area proposed for a redevelopment zone, and that was the area covered by Prop. D, the proposed mid-Market sign district, in 2009.

In fact, when I walked Market Street with measure sponsor David Addington (owner of the Warfield Building) in 2009, he made a point of noting that the blight was contained on just that two-block stretch. As I wrote at the time, “As Addington points out, this is the most dilapidated stretch of Market Street, rife with vacant storefronts and cheap retail outlets, but bordered by U.N. Plaza on one side and the bustling Westfield Mall and Powell Street cable car stop on the other. It's a two-block stretch that is neglected and ignored by much of the outside world.”

Sponsors of the tax break measure make no secret of the fact that the boundaries were specifically tailored to facilitate the Twitter-Dworman deal, even as the deal is deceptively sold as an antidote to mid-Market blight. But such deception is common when it comes to corporate welfare, as the Bay Citizen points out in another great article today.

It notes that ritzy Union Square and many other thriving Bay Area neighborhoods are deemed to be blighted “enterprise zones,” in which business owners reap big tax breaks on new hires. In San Francisco alone, corporations are using that claim to reduce their tax burden by about $100 million per year, and the estimate statewide would be $581 million in increased revenue per year if the enterprise zones are eliminated, as Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed.

It's still amazing to me that everyone is so up-in-arms over public employee pensions – compensation that the unions have bargained for and been awarded by the same politicians who are now wringing their hands over the “problem” – yet corporate welfare programs continue to thrive and expand.