You won’t hear much of me complaining, anymore, about the Stalinist Board of Supervisors of San Francisco. We finally have our corruption back.
I wrote about the history of sophisticated corruption in San Francisco in a blog on 11/1. We now have our corruption back. We got a Starbucks in Aaron Peskin’s district at the cable car turnaround at Fisherman’s Wharf. We have the Westfield Mall expansion to the Metreon, a new Intercontinental Hotel, Folsom Street blocked off for a week for the convenience of Larry Ellison, we get 100 stories of new apartments (60 and 40 stories high) on Rincon Hill all in Chris Daly’s district.
What happened and why did we go through a period where the corruption wasn’t working? We got a new structure in our government. Six years ago we got district elections (we had them for a few years in the late 1970’s until one district supervisor murdered the Mayor and Harvey Milk). It took six years, since 2000, for our sophisticated corruption system to grow back, and start working again.
I love corruption and so does commerce. We're talking corruption at very low levels; we do not function with completely No-corruption. Government is inefficient and often incompetent; low level corruption is the only way to make government work better.
Corruption that is visible, that is pervasive or common is very disruptive to commerce as one learns in the Third World. But corruption that acts like a simple WD40 to overcome rust, is necessary. Conrad Hilton had a policy: no hotels in cities without prostitutes. Prostitutes were a sign of modest but reasonable corruption, for Hilton, who knew that a big hotel needed modest corruption to operate profitably.
The City can get back to work our corruption has returned.