Harvey Milk Club Leads the Way, the Mission Rises Up, and New Leadership at City College

Happy Birthday, Harvey Milk

The Harvey Milk Club gave our community a great present for what would have been Milk’s 85th birthday on May 22. The Club took over the Castro Theatre that night, arranging for a screening of Rob Epstein’s classic documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. The screening was followed by a panel discussion with the filmmaker as well as Milk associates Tom Ammiano (who as a young teacher, worked with Milk on the fight against Proposition 6), Harry Britt (Milk’s successor on the Board of Supervisors), Gwenn Craig (former president of the Harvey Milk Club), Henry Der (former executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action), and Tory Hartmann (Milk’s political consultant and friend). As a former Club president myself, it was a treat to see the Milk Club name and logo up in lights at the iconic theater, but it was an even greater thrill to see current Milk Co-Presidents Laura Thomas and Peter Gallotta and other Club activists doing such a great job of keeping Harvey’s legacy alive and strong.

Mission Moratorium

The Milk Club has also been playing a strong supporting role to the efforts of District 9 Supervisor David Campos and Mission activists to enact a temporary moratorium on development of market rate housing in the Mission. Milk Club members were out in force for the Democratic County Central Committee’s May 27 meeting at which the DCCC considered a resolution in support of the measure, as well as the Board of Supervisors’ June 2 meeting where the Supervisors took action on the proposal itself. In between, on May 30, the Club joined with Calle 24—the Mission activist group spearheading the moratorium—for a protest at Castro and Market, calling on District 8 Supervisor Scott Wiener to support the moratorium and other efforts to slow the alarmingly rapid loss of affordable housing. Of course, the proposal lost at both the DCCC and the Board, although in each case by a narrower margin than I had expected. The vote at the DCCC was 13–10 against, while at the Board of Supervisors, the moratorium was supported by 7 of 11 Supervisors, but fell short of the 9 votes it needed to pass.

Regular readers will probably not be surprised to learn that I was one of the ten DCCC votes for the moratorium. Supervisor Wiener and other opponents have argued that it is madness to impose a moratorium to deal with a shortage of affordable housing. However, although the opposition’s theoretical arguments make some sense to me, I have found moratorium supporters far more compelling when they argue that, counter-intuitive as it may seem, a temporary moratorium is necessary to create time for the development and implementation of an affordable housing strategy in the neighborhood.