Black Tie Old Hat as San Francisco Awaits a Blue-Collar Mayor

Art Agnos will not take the oath as the 39th mayor of San Francisco until Jan. 8, but trendmongers in the local newspapers and leading nightspots already have declared that a “new style” is reshaping the city:

Black-tie is out, they declare. Blue collar is in.

In some ways, they could be right--even if they only see the difference in personal style between Mayor-elect Agnos, a father of two who hails from the unassuming Potrero Hill district, and current Mayor Dianne Feinstein, an elegant aesthete from blue-stocking Pacific Heights.

San Francisco is unlikely to lose its image as an archetypal post-industrial city--banks, hotels and other service industries still employ far more people than do foundries and factories.

But both Feinstein, who is prevented by the City Charter from a third four-year term, and Agnos have said the city must diversify to remain economically strong. The city must, they suggested, nurture its biggest industries--tourism and finance--while at the same time try to revive those blue-collar crafts and trades so eagerly sloughed off over the last three decades.

“That’s really the way to go,” Feinstein said. “We’re a big white-collar city; the need is to develop blue-collar jobs in addition to that.”

Range Contemplated

The goal is not to reinvent Detroit, but to focus on smaller companies that could include anything from film making to fishing, upscale garment manufacture to applied biotechnology.

A rediscovery of the virtues of the blue collar--or, as Feinstein prefers, the “new collar”--is but one of the different directions San Francisco may be taking as it prepares to install its first new mayor in nearly a decade.

As more than one civic leader has noted, San Francisco, hub of the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan region, faces some critical issues. Will high-rise restrictions make the city more livable or less affluent? Will banning multifamily dwellings preserve quaint old houses or merely push high housing prices even higher? Will the development of old, disused railroad yards--the biggest potential home of the new manufacturing companies being touted--give the city more jobs and needed housing or congestion and blight?

At the same time, the city faces a particularly crushing problem with AIDS, which kills on average three San Franciscans per day, and with a projected budget deficit next year of at least $77 million. Adding to this are a sizable number of people without homes and office buildings without tenants.

Cities Forced to Choose

“Every so often, cities get to the point where they have to choose between development and deterioration,” said Paul Wright of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. “San Francisco is at that point now.”

Not all is gloomy. San Francisco boasts a jobless rate of only 4.7%; the highest household income, $32,218, of major U.S. cities; a vital, old downtown shopping district and an ever-growing tourist and convention industry, as well as what Dun and Bradstreet Corp. says is the country’s highest rate per capita of business starts and new-business successes.

“With the start-up rate of business; the way things are going here, it (the city) is not in decline,” Feinstein said.

But many people believe the city has reached a critical turning point--and that Agnos, swept into power with 70% of the vote, will be the person choosing which path to follow.

So far, Agnos has given little hint of his intentions.

“Do we want tourism, high tech, low tech or biotech?” he asked during the campaign. “We can’t be what Los Angeles is: all things to all people. We must become as Boston is to New York . . . (and) pursue specialized competition.”

As with Boston, San Francisco’s nearest megalopolis is considerably larger. Metropolitan Los Angeles encompasses about 12 million people; metropolitan San Francisco, only about half that many. The city of Los Angeles alone is home to about 3 million people; the city and county of San Francisco, about 750,000.

Unclear on Relationship

However, Massachusetts-born Agnos has been unclear about how San Francisco should complement Los Angeles. Before the election, he merely said that “San Francisco needs a business plan around which consensus is built.” After the election, he went on vacation in Hawaii, where aides said he could not be reached.

Some clues can be gleaned from his platform. Among other things, he called for reviving the waterfront and fishing industry, which he said should be “a diverse employment base . . . particularly in meeting the increasing demand for blue-collar jobs.”

At the same time, the future mayor proposed a city program to provide homes for people other than “wealthy, upper-class professionals.” The high cost of housing--an upscale three-bedroom house sells for $385,000, a Coldwell Banker real-estate survey found--is blamed for persistent suburban flight by middle-class families, leaving only the very wealthy and the very poor in San Francisco.

Among Agnos’ ideas for working-class housing are the issuance of municipal bonds to help first-time home buyers make down payments, and make surplus city land available at no cost to developers of low- to moderate-cost housing.

Home for Working People

“Average working people who have traditionally lived in San Francisco, and have been an integral part of this community, can continue to live here in the future . . . if we work hard to make it happen,” he said.

In addition to traditional blue-collar tasks, both Agnos and Feinstein have focused on their modern counterparts, so-called “new-collar” jobs.

Feinstein said in her 1987 State of the City report that “a concentrated drive will be required to retain our present employment base and attract new employers, particularly those in the emerging ‘new collar’ light industries, research and development, biotechnology and other creative enterprises--the focus of new job growth.”

Business leaders said they have heard this before, including reports by the Arthur Andersen Co. that suggested this kind of diversification twice, in 1984 and again in 1986. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce recently launched its own Economic Development Corp., which includes as one of its goals development of blue-collar jobs, said Wright, the chamber’s deputy executive director.

“There is right now some growth for the first time in a long time in (this area),” Wright said. “There is some potential there, but . . . it is still too early to say for sure how much potential. . . . There are some issues we have to be practical about--things like land costs and accessibility.”

Some Space Available

Some industrial space is available now at some long-abandoned factory sites in the south-of-Market Street area, Feinstein said. Even more space is planned in the Mission Bay project, which has been proposed to redevelop an expanse of old railroad yards and utility buildings that the mayor says is “the nation’s largest single inner-city development.”

The move by San Francisco leaders to embrace manufacturing reflects two new shared realities and two different world views.

One reality is the growing community of eager but unskilled immigrants that have moved into the city. These new residents--mostly Asian, but with a large number of Central Americans--comprise a working-class unlike any seen for many years here.

This could account for the city’s manufacturing boomlet. Dun & Bradstreet Corp. found that about twice as many manufacturing companies were begun in the first six months of 1987 as in the same period a year earlier--although these employers still rank well behind both tourism and finance.

Another reality is the uncertain public sentiment about continued growth in white-collar jobs. Expanding white-collar job opportunities in the early 1980s caused commercial rents to rise and developers to overbuild. Those high rents, meanwhile, pushed some firms out to the suburbs, while the city enacted strict growth controls in response to concerns about the overbuilding.

Silicon Valley Impact

The city’s white-collar community also has been hit by hard times in nearby Silicon Valley, which employs many of San Francisco’s accountants, consultants and bankers.

These developments, magnified by well-publicized complaints by some members of the business community, led many to wonder if San Franciscans were becoming antagonistic to their own financial district. This worry persists, even though Dun and Bradstreet found 7% annual growth in the city’s finance, insurance and real-estate sectors earlier this year.

The different world views belong to Feinstein and Agnos themselves.

Feinstein, a wealthy woman married to an investment banker, came to embrace the notion of blue-collar renaissance after her extensive travels on behalf of San Francisco, particularly to Japan, China and other Pacific Rim nations. For her, it is a way to keep the whole Bay Area economy humming.

She believes several factors--a weaker dollar, a better-educated work force in the United States and fear of protectionism--have taught Asian firms that it can be wiser to supply American consumers from American factories. The Sony television plant in San Diego and the joint General Motors-Toyota automobile factory in Fremont south of here are two current examples, she said, and she expects that garments will be added to the list soon.

Sees Salary Savings

“I believe, increasingly, you can manufacture clothing for the American market more cheaply in California than in Hong Kong,” Feinstein said, giving no notice to popular wisdom to the contrary. “The great bulk of those garment companies that are here now . . . tell me they make more money from their plants here because they can use higher technology here.

“I see in the future a rebirth of the (local) garment industry. (With) our high Asian population--they are very good in this industry--it’s a natural.”

Meanwhile, Agnos, an immigrant bootblack’s son married to a state employee, sees blue-collar work as essential not so much to the entire region’s economy, but to individuals--the poor, the immigrant, the modestly educated and others with whom he dealt as a young social worker.

One of his proudest achievements as a public official, he often remarks, is his role as mediator between no-growth activists and a developer that resulted in the transformation of a disused armory building in a poor neighborhood into a small film studio. Not only did it help the city’s overall economy, he said, but it promises “250 to 300 new, well-paying, blue-collar union jobs” and an “apprenticeship program aimed at recruiting neighborhood youths for the union positions.”

Opportunities Unclear

Whether Agnos will be able to continue pursuing such things as mayor is not clear. Feinstein, who supported Agnos’ opponent, Supervisor John Molinari, in the mayoral election, has warned Agnos that he will face a perpetual budget tussle as the city is pinched by greater expenditures for the homeless, AIDS patients and other social services the new mayor has promised.

“The budget has to be pulled in. . . . You can’t just spend. You have to set limits and adhere to those limits. I figure I’ve had to say ‘no’ more than all the mayors in city history,” she said, “and the next mayor will, too.”

Agnos has said he will seek out partnerships with the private sector to see the city through such problems as the AIDS crisis.

An example he cites is encouraging area private industry to help charitable groups caring for people with AIDS; another is to establish a private coalition to develop less-costly treatment alternatives.

At the same time, Agnos has recommended dealing with San Francisco’s problems by adopting ideas being used elsewhere--an alcohol-abuse program from San Diego, a youth-employment project from Baltimore, fund-raising ideas from Cincinnati.

“We must think and plan ahead. We must break new ground as we go about the job of governing the city,” Agnos said during his campaign. “At issue is the future of our city and the leadership we need to shape change so all of us can have a place in that future.”