 So next I'd like to introduce Jose Cisneros, Fred Blackwell and Alicia Jean-Baptiste for new systems for shared prosperity. Jose Cisneros is the elected treasurer for the city and county of San Francisco. As treasurer, he serves as the city's banker and chief investment officer, managing all tax and revenue collection for San Francisco. Fred Blackwell is the CEO of the San Francisco Foundation. Prior to joining the foundation, he served as interim city administrator for the city of Oakland, executive director for the San Francisco redevelopment agency, and director of the mayoral office of community development in San Francisco. Alicia Jean-Baptiste is the president and CEO of SPUR, a seasoned leader in public policy professional. Alicia has over 20 years of experience reimagining systems to create better outcomes for people. So welcome our panel for new systems for shared prosperity. Hi everybody, I'm Alicia Jean-Baptiste. It's such a pleasure to be with you all today. I'm going to do just a minute of table setting before we jump into our conversation, just to talk about why we are talking about economic inequality. And this is, of course, an issue that presents across the United States, but it is particularly acute here in the Bay Area. In the city of San Francisco, we have one of the most significant income divides of any place in the country. The top 5% of earners in San Francisco make more than $574,000 a year, while the bottom 20% are clocking in at under $53,000. San Francisco Chronicle just recently released a poll that revealed that fully 76% of people who live in San Francisco identify income inequality and economic inequality as an incredibly challenging issue that needs to be addressed. And for many of us, certainly for myself growing up in the 70s and 80s, we are coming into this conversation having been taught a series of ideas. For example, that supply side economics is going to work for us, that economic divides are okay because when you have people who have wealth, they will eventually create jobs and money will flow to the rest of us. In addition, we've been taught that if we just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and work really hard, we too can be one of those wealthy people. What those ideas have largely ignored has been the role of structural racism in creating the dynamics that we experienced today and we see these dynamics in the numbers. We have in California, black and Latinx families representing 43% of the state's population but 58% of our lowest income households. And here in the Bay Area, white earners make a median income of 92,000 annually while Latinx workers are paid 44,000, black workers 54,000. So it's no surprise that black and Latinx communities are some of the most likely to be struggling in order to be able to afford to live here. So aside from sort of the basic injustice of that dynamic, economic inequality comes with a lot of risk. We know that societies that experience great levels of economic inequality also have worse health outcomes, lower educational attainment, slower economic growth, higher crime rates, and more concentrated political power which in turn can lead to the political insecurity and social distrust that so many of us are experiencing in this nation today. So there are a lot of reasons for this, a lot of causes of economic inequality which also means that there is more than one solution. And we're going to spend a little bit of time today talking about some of those and where we can find hope in this whole picture. And I'm so excited to be joined by Jose Cisneros and Fred Blackwell who are daily doing this important work. And I think we're just going to dive in and start with a question for you Fred. One of our significant challenges in the Bay Area and across California as a whole is housing and the affordability of housing. And of course, everybody, most of us pay to have a roof over our heads but only those of us who can afford to own a home actually also get to have that as an asset. Can you talk a little bit about the work that you're doing at the foundation on this topic and also maybe why the dynamics on housing are so cute here in the Bay Area? Yeah, thank you and good to be here with everyone. A few things come to mind, Alicia. I mean, when folks think about the intersection of kind of housing with economic opportunity and wealth, generally people just go straight to home ownership. And for good reason. I mean, for this country that's been the way that a lot of folks have been able to grow a nest egg, support things that needed, assets in order to advance their families, but actually housing has an even deeper relationship to economic opportunity. And especially here in a place where the economic situation that you described in terms of the kind of barbell income strata as well as the just the high cost of housing really dramatically impact people's economic status and ability to be economically mobile and just a few examples of that. I mean, first of all, housing instability. When a family is unstable, kids are unable to have a stable environment when it comes to school and the kinds of amenities and things that they draw on to get an education into advance. Housing expense is really important as well. When you were spending upwards of 50%, 60% of your income on housing, it doesn't allow you to create the kind of nest egg that moves you into home ownership. It doesn't allow you to create the or present the kind of credit profile if you're an entrepreneur that you need in order to get access to capital. It doesn't give you the opportunity in some instances to kind of have access to the kinds of amenities that you really need as a family and as an individual in order to advance and grow. And to that point, warehousing is matters. You know, in here in the Bay Area, there's a stark contrast between some of the suburban well funded communities that have access to good schools, good parks, good transportation, good access to freeways, things like that. Versus if you are a low income person, you may be in an area where, you know, your address or your zip code can be a sentence to lack of opportunity. Because of the lack of amenities and infrastructure that's there and available to you. So housing I think really just impacts one's ability to make it economically in all kinds of different ways. And families here as a result are really struggling both economically and from a housing point of view to make ends meet and to thrive. The things that we are doing cut across a whole variety of strategies. I mean, we're working on programmatic solutions. We're working on policy oriented solutions, investment oriented solutions. And we're also really heavily working in the regulatory environment so that the housing can be produced in all parts of the region. So that folks who are renting have the adequate level of rent and protection available to them. And for folks who actually live in an affordable housing and are blessed to do that, make sure that housing stays affordable. And so there are all kinds of things that we can go into later that kind of demonstrate the ability to work on all those fronts. But I think that, you know, that is really what the mix looks like for us. And I think the reason why we think it's important and why housing and economic security really need to be linked. Thanks, Fred. So Jose, Fred, I think provided some of the kind of structural insight into how we are in the situation that we're in. And of course, you as treasurer have been deeply involved in financial empowerment and financial justice, which strikes me as a little bit unusual for a treasurer. And maybe you can talk a little bit about how you got into this and what you've been focused on. Thanks, Alicia. It's great to join you and Fred. It's great to see everyone here today. Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that we can all say about local government is that we're involved in a lot of ways in lots of people's lives, whether they know it or not. And I think oftentimes we forget how many ways local government gets involved. But in the treasurer's office, let me just share the full title, Treasurer Text Collector's Office. It really grows the popularity. And we're involved a lot with the finances of the city. We have a lot of folks in our office who know a lot about how to handle money and be successful with money. But we can easily see that there's a lot of folks in our community who aren't as knowledgeable, aren't as well equipped, don't have access to the right financial products and tools to be able to be successful. So as long as I've been treasurer, we've been launching programs to help people, low-income people, largely members of communities of color who've been disadvantaged, uninformed, or actually just cut off from the appropriate opportunities to build wealth and to be financially successful. So we launched a program to help people who don't have bank accounts get connected to a bank account and could stop paying five, six, or $700 a year in fees to a check cashier. We now connect folks one-on-one to a financial coach so they can understand, for example, what their credit score is all about and how they can manage their debt versus their savings, how they can have the right financial products. And many of those interactions lead to vast improvements in people's financial scores and financial outcomes. The program started a program with the local school district here where we automatically open up a college savings account for every child in the public schools here in San Francisco so that every kid and their family are saving for talking about and building aspirations for college or advanced educational outcomes of whatever kind that make a person successful no matter where they grow up. So we want to do things like that to really look at how we can help people be more successful in spite of the systemic and structural challenges that they might face. I do want to share, though, in a spirit of full disclosure that about five years ago we started to look at what our own city governments, fines and fees were doing and how we were impacting people right here in our own city. And what we found, and this is not exciting, what we found is that times our own fines and fees were becoming predatory and harmful to low-income people in our community. Let me describe how. Anytime a fine or a fee is one dollar amount for everybody, it just follows. But that impact of that fine or fee is going to be far different on a low-income individual or a low-income family than it is on a middle or particularly high-income family or individual. And we see, unfortunately, impacts about that all over the place. Let me give you a quick example. If someone just happens to park in the wrong place at a time on a street where we need to clear the cars for rush hour, they might get their car towed. So usually the signage is all there, it just happens, it happens every day. Well, when you get your car towed in San Francisco to go get it back, it costs nearly $500 on day one. I'm not talking storage fees or anything. Well, the truth of the matter is a low-income family, the vast majority of low-income families don't have that kind of money. They don't have $500 waiting. And you know what? They lose their car. Well, what happens if a family loses their car? Does that mean a wage earner can't get to work? If that person can't get to work, does that mean they lose their job? And if they lose their job, can they no longer pay their rent? So then do they get evicted? Does anyone think that parking in the wrong place at the wrong time means a family ought to get evicted from their home? Of course not. Of course not. So that's what the Financial Justice Project that we started all these years ago is all about. How do we fix that problem? And what we found in a case like that is we have to right-size that financial penalty, that financial fine for getting your car towed by parking in the wrong place. And today we brought that $500 class down to $100 for the poorest people in our community, and for someone actually living in their car, that tow fine is reduced to zero. So we're really trying to be responsive and I think this is what the government needs to do. It's what it's all about. We need to be fair. We need to right-size things or even eliminate fees if they just don't make sense if they're causing more harm than good. I could go on and on with more examples and we've actually changed or eliminated at this point now dozens of fines and fees in San Francisco. We still have a lot of work to do. We still need to make sure that we're treating everybody fairly and we're not being harmful to anybody in our community. So one of the things that COVID did is it brought into just very vivid, clear view where we had fault lines and fractures in our sort of structure of economic security as a community and I know Fred, the San Francisco Foundation has done a lot of work to work with different parts of the different cities in the region, different organizations in the region to look at what kinds of interventions that were invented during COVID could be and should be carried forward because while the situation was very acute during COVID it was all preceded by that pandemic. Can you talk a little bit about what you've seen as most promising, what you think we need to be pursuing at this point? Yeah, you know, a couple of things come to mind on this. One is that I don't know if everybody else has been kind of reading these articles recently but about maybe two or three weeks ago there was this kind of series of articles that came out in the New York Times and other places talking about the dramatic reductions in child poverty over the last year and kind of doing a little bit of analysis around how that happened during that time. I can't help but think that things like the expansion of the child care tax credit, things like what I would actually characterize as one of the biggest guaranteed income or universal basic income programs in the stimulus checks that went out. Those kinds of things and there probably a list of three or four others that we did kind of in that moment that I think really did a lot to raise the floor for low-income families and to do it in ways that were different than the way that we thought about it before and really kind of challenged our kind of common thinking around how it is that we need to be presenting supports to low-income families. I mean, we often, I think for years, and I can point to many political instances where folks were characterizing low-income folks as not being able to manage money well and that you can't trust them with AFDC and all that kind of stuff. I'm sure everybody in here remembers that body of work. When the reality is that folks who are low-income probably are managing dollars and better at managing money than any of us because they know how to stretch a dollar. But that's not the only part of it. We also know, I mean, we have people and I think Maurice Miller has spoken at this conference in the past. He runs something called the Family Independence Initiative. That has always been about trusting families to know best what to do with their dollars. And so I think that a lot of the things that we experimented with during that period kind of in the spirit of trying to be responsive to the real intense situation that was associated with COVID, they need to continue. We need to continue to think about how we can give families cash aid to get them above the poverty line. We need to continue to think about how we expand programs that provide access to good food and high-quality food. We need to continue to think about how we have a tax structure that supports low-income families, families with children, and not just kind of the kinds of approaches that we've used in the past to kind of create a tax situation that supports a trickle-down set of economic circumstances that we already know don't work. Yeah, I'm really glad that you raised this because it strikes me that guaranteed income is a great example of sort of a mindset shift that has taken place in the policy world and what you were describing, Jose, with the sort of self-analysis of in what ways is government creating poverty conditions for people, unintentionally, presumably, but nonetheless creating those conditions. To me, it really speaks to a different way of understanding poverty and taking poverty out of the kind of framework of individual failure and moral failure and poverty as proof that you've done something wrong and putting it instead into a framework of poverty as an outcome that is designed. It is a totally logical outcome of the way that we have our systems designed. I'm very curious about how did we get to a point where we could start to make that mindset shift and where does it take us? Because we get really stuck. We think we know what's true and then we start to see something a little bit differently and sometimes it takes off. We've seen guaranteed income pilots popping up everywhere has been terrific, but how does that happen and where does it take us? I would just say, and I couldn't agree with you more, Alicia, I would just say that as painful as the last few years have been to your and Fred's points, we've really had an opportunity to have our eyes opened. We, at the city level, we really stepped up and worked very, very hard to help people who were struggling the most during the pandemic. We were kicking into high gear. We were finding ways to give food replacement cards out to people, income replacement cards out to people, wages while they were having to quarantine replacement values out to people. All these things, we really stood them up and put them in place. It felt like overnight. I'm sure we could have gone faster, but really we managed to turn ourselves around and serve a lot of folks. And I think it really, as I said, opened up our eyes to the potential of how helpful and how meaningful and how fundamentally life-changing that kind of help can be. Fred, to your point, obviously the federal government stepped in in some very major ways, helped people nationwide. But I think that what we've learned from a lot of that has been that we don't need to be restricted by old patterns and old practices. We really can break the mold. We really are now launching, to your point, a number of more guaranteed income pilots where we had one, we called Abundant Babies, where we helped expecting mothers, particularly who were facing statistically lower, less successful outcomes. We're now also looking at one to help folks aging out of foster care to help them get up on their feet and that. And particularly I'm excited about the role that our office, the Treasurer's Office, has been able to play. Because we always need to be mindful of what are the unexpected impacts of helping people with these financial types of assistance. For example, a lot of folks we're enrolling in these types of programs might be receiving public benefits already. They might be receiving food stamps, some sort of affordable housing, some sort of public assistance. We want to make sure that the monies we're giving them don't put them in a place where now all of a sudden they're no longer eligible for those types of benefits because those benefits are fundamental to the success of their families. And so we've had to take a close look at tax laws, other types of policies to make sure that what we're doing, we're doing in a way that's not in any way producing unintended harms, but rather is only delivering the benefits and the good. And when we do those programs, not only are we making sure that we're not causing any harm, but we're more often than not, when we evaluate them, seeing that people, to your point, Fred, they're not giving in to unnecessary whims or luxuries. They're rather, more often than not, taking care of fundamental needs, paying the rent, paying for a child's needs, taking care of some old debt that's been a burden for a long time. I couldn't agree with you more, Fred. People that have the least amount of money who are living close to the edge are probably the best people in the world managing how to stretch a dollar and how to manage a very limited amount of funding and financial opportunity to make for the best outcomes. And we want to just grow that and build on that and have the city play a role with all kinds of partners to see how we can produce better lives for people here. Alicia, you know, one thing I want to jump on here that I think is important to kind of lift up in this context is like the importance of the right kind of philanthropy. And the reason this comes up for me is, you know, we at the San Francisco Foundation have been operating and guided by North Star that's about creating a greater degree of racial equity and economic inclusion at a regional level of scale here in the Bay Area. And shortly after we designated that North Star, we really kind of came to the conclusion that while programs and services at scale were really important in terms of kind of being able to deliver services and get basic needs to families. And that was particularly true during the early stages of the COVID epidemic. That approach is necessary but also insufficient. And that we also need to be focusing in on what we're learning through the delivery of services and programs and translate that into good public policy that takes that work to scale. And that only gets done when the philanthropic sector is looking for those lessons and willing the partner with the public sector. And so that's a really key thing because everything that we're talking about right now, I mean, folks really rushed in a good way and a responsive way to make sure that people had, you know, basic needs met. Food, shelter, clothing, sometimes cash. And that was important to do. But what we're learning is that what was also important to do was to think about how we could demonstrate that that was working and now needs to be translated into public policy that supports those kinds of approaches long-term to support families. I wanted to thank you as those were great points. I want to talk a little bit about the kind of building on this question of scaling. We've been talking a lot about raising the floor. And, you know, we spent a little bit of time in Denmark my organization did doing a study trip and what we learned from the way that Denmark has their economy organized is the government is incredibly motivated to make sure everybody participates in the economy because that's how they generate the tax revenue they need to pay for things like free college and free healthcare and it's almost free transit, etc. Which raises everybody's quality of life. We are not in a position where our taxes are providing that level of service to our people. And I guess I'm curious how you think about sort of the other side of this, the redistributive side of this, how do you scale these programs that do lift the floor until such a time at least that there are more folks who are in the system generating that revenue themselves. You know, you said something really important in terms of your visit to Denmark, which is they viewed it as a competitive advantage. You know, in a global economy your ability to compete as a nation depends on your ability to present a skilled, ready, working workforce to the global economy and to the extent that only a fraction of your population is contributing to the economic growth in the region you are putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. I don't know why we haven't come to that conclusion yet here. But that is exactly the kind of thing that we need to do. This is, you know, I've grown up in a family of folks that are about social and economic justice all my life so I believe all of this stuff is the moral thing to do, it's the right thing to do. It's also the competitively expedient and more impactful way to approach the work. We will not remain competitive as long as we are leaving people behind. And so we've got to figure out a way to have a tax system, to have a set of public policies that not just raise the floor but foster economic mobility if we want to continue to be called a world-class country. Definitely, and I just want to add, I couldn't agree more, but I just want to add that combines both fresh new ideas and new programs with a complete look and analysis and possible overhaul of all of our current and past practices because as I've just said, we've been finding over and over again where the city, our practices, and then this isn't our city alone. This is every local government and state governments all across the country have the same types of fines, fees, and injustices built into their system that have been there for decades. No one created these yesterday or decided to put them out there today. They've been around forever and that's why people are not aware of the impact we're having. So we really need to analyze and to some degree tear down practices we've had in place for years and years and years because we've just got to be realized and recognize that they're harming people, they're not helping people. Thank you, Vlad. So we're coming close on our time, but just in our final moments here, I'd love to hear from you all. This is long-term work, right? This is long-term work. 10 years, 20 years from now, assuming that we continue to make progress, what would you hope to see that lets us know we're on the right path? Yeah, Alicia, it's a great question. It's long-term work and it is also work that I've concluded doesn't get delivered or hit the point that it needs to make or have the impact that it needs to have with just good memos and PowerPoints and solid data. Folks have to be engaged. You know, I, as I said, I've spent a whole career, lifetime focused in on issues having to do with racial equity and made a lot of presentations, analyzed a lot of data. I've had PowerPoint presentations with just the right amount of white space and number of bullets. And in the summer of 2020, young people who said enough is enough took to the streets and created a conversation in this country that has opened the door. The open doors that I didn't know were available to be open, frankly, to advance that cause. And so it's a long game and I think one of the things that we have to make sure that we pay attention to is that we are not going to program ourselves out of this mess. People need to be engaged. People need to be engaged on this issue. People need to be engaged if we have any hope of holding on to the democracy that I think we all have taken for granted. And I think that that's an important part of the solution, which is also a part of the long game. And I would just build on that by saying I was going to say a lot of the same things, but I want everyone in this room and everybody in this country to be engaged in the work on this and I would urge everyone, please, don't just think about this. Don't just even just talk about this. I wish people would be bold. I wish people would come to the local government and tell us what we need to be doing more and more and more. I wish people would work with us more and help us understand better about the impacts we're having and the tools that we could exercise to make things better for all sorts of members in our community. And I think with that, we can do things like build more affordable housing. We can do things like have more job training programs and build more opportunities and create programs that help people get there. So I'm just, first of all, I want to thank you both so much. I was just going to close with my young son asked me the other day if you had three wishes from a genie, what would they be? And so I asked him, well, you tell me first. And he said, well, I would wish to eliminate poverty and climate change and sprout wings so I could fly whenever I wanted to. So let us all sprout wings and fly. Thank you. Thank you.