Clearly, The San Francisco Chronicle excels at publishing talking points from corporate special interests. In today’s release, they boil down the epic battle for the soul of Bayview to just another installment of Chris Daly versus the Newsom establishment (with Supervisors Peskin and McGoldrick now on the other side). Like any good corporate PR firm, The Chronicle doesn’t even acknowledge the community in opposition to the Lennar’s land grab — no mention of the 1,000-person coalition that’s been protesting Lennar for blanketing the neighborhood with asbestos dust and no mention of the 33,000 San Franciscans who signed the referendum of the Bayview Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan and whose voices were silenced by a legal technicality. And, of course, The Chronicle fails to mention of the fact that the Lennar Corporation is single-handedly funding their campaign – to the tune of over $500,000.

In what amounts to a Gavin Newsom political jobs program, Lennar has already dumped over $250,000 into San Francisco’s biggest political consultants. Terris, Barnes, and Walters have received over $100,000. Eric Jaye’s Storefront Consulting and Singer and Associates have each received at least $50,000. Jim Stearns and Alex Tourk’s Ground Floor have taken in $25,000 and $20,000 respectively. And the campaign hasn’t even gotten going yet!

Even with what seems to be the entire political establishment on retainer, Lennar must have been caught off-guard by the timing of the Bayview Affordable Housing Initiative. Typically, Lennar uses elements from the community that they’ve bought off to do their bidding for them. Today, Lennar had to do its own dirty work…

The Daly-backed measure “is essentially a poison pill,” said Kofi Bonner, president of Lennar’s urban land division in San Francisco. “No private developer is going to be able to create something on this scale of development, including parks and infrastructure, and be able to provide 50 percent affordable housing.”

Funny. I actually agree with Lennar on this. We shouldn’t rely solely on private developers, especially the likes of Lennar, to deliver the affordable housing that we need in San Francisco. In fact, last year the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution establishing policy for the eastern neighborhoods of San Francisco authored by Sophie Maxwell and co-sponsored by the aforementioned Mssrs. Peskin and McGoldrick. In it the Board sets an aggressive goal for affordable housing production – 64% with “28% of housing affordable to Moderate Income households, 10% of housing affordable to Low Income households, and 26% of housing affordable to Very Low Income households.” The policy goes on to say that the “affordable housing implementation strategy developed with the Mayor’s Office of Housing (and) the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (should) include the mechanisms and financial resources needed to meet the housing production percentage targets specified.”

So, how is the Bayview Affordable Housing Initiative off-target with this policy? If anything, the measure doesn’t mandate enough affordable housing. That’s a far cry from the positions of Peskin and McGoldrick. In the largest swath of underdeveloped land in San Francisco, in one of the most affordable-housing hungry neighborhoods of our City, we need to be delivering unprecedented levels of affordability to meet our housing challenge. The Bayview Affordable Housing Initiative, along with November’s Affordable Housing Charter Amendment, will do this.

So what’s the problem? I think that The Chronicle sums it all up in two little sentences. “Bonner said the Lennar project is estimated to cost $1.4 billion. The company would expect to eventually make a 20 to 25 percent rate of return on its investment.” Twenty-five percent of $1.4 billion is $350 million — simple math. $350 million is the profit Lennar admits it wants to extract from the Bayview, and that’s the problem.