Condo restrictions aren’t needed

I am very disappointed with Supervisor Bevan Dufty and Mayor Gavin Newsom for supporting Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s restrictive tenancy-in-common measure. As past champions for TIC homeowners, Dufty and Newsom have betrayed our community and pushed San Francisco one step closer to outlawing condo conversions altogether.

Ellis evictions are down and haven’t reached epidemic proportions to warrant such extreme legislation. In reality, restrictive TIC legislation and limited housing supply are the epidemic that’s forcing families out of San Francisco.

Renter advocates have always found a sympathetic ear at City Hall to fight for their cause. For homeowners, City Hall has always turned a deaf ear by eroding TIC-homeownership rights.

Sadly, Dufty and Newsom turned a deaf ear to homeowners at the moment we needed them most.

Randy Brasche

President, San Francisco TIC Coalition

The City

Suburbs’ sweet deal

Steve Lawrence in his letter “S.F. soaked by suburbs” hits the nail on the head, but he doesn’t go far enough. There is not a single form of infrastructure where The City does not get soaked.

City residents pay the same infrastructure taxes per unit income as a suburbanite, yet we get far, far less for our money. Consider Muni, which gets a minute fraction of the funding BART gets. Even on BART, suburbanites pay significantly less per mile than city residents do.

The same is true of roads, gas lines, electricity lines and just about everything else. Every time you pay an infrastructure bill, you subsidize companies and individuals leaving The City for the suburbs.

Donald F. Robertson

The City

How to fix the schools

As a parent of two children in the San Francisco Unified School District, I have three proposals to address often-voiced dissatisfaction.

First, give local school placement the highest priority. Applying greater placement weight to other factors, such as the mother’s education level, inconveniences parents and reduces ownership and involvement in local schools.

Second, the district should embrace “banding,” the principle of grouping students of similar abilities. In this way, curriculum can be shaped and taught at a pace that provides true challenges to all students, with none at the top left bored and none at the bottom left overwhelmed.

Third, the district should encourage school-related, parent-paid extracurricular enrichment. This will induce parents with means, who leave the district for more enriching suburban districts or for private schools, to enroll their children. These children will raise the ability quotient of district schools, and their better-off parents will lavish the time, wealth and attention that could make district schools great.

Jason Jungreis

The City

High school exit exams

A judge is saying that the exit exams for high school seniors may be unfair. My brothers and sisters and I went to school in N.Y. in the sixties and seventies and we all had to take what they call the Regents.

The Regents is an exit exam. These tests are not something new. People for whom English is a second language have to take and pass the Regents in N.Y.

It is not unreasonable to expect the graduating class to have learned enough to pass an exit exam. Why are we lowering the standards rather than maintaining our expectations that students meet reasonable standards?

Daniel Dougan

The City

Enforce immigration laws

In 1986, we granted amnesty to 2.7 million illegal aliens who were within our borders. This was supposed to solve our illegal immigration problem. Predictably, it only made the problem worse.

The only solution is to demand that our federal government enforce our immigration laws. We have troops all over the world protecting other nations. Let’s bring some of them home and beef up security of our southern border.

Next we must enforce laws pertaining to document fraud and the hiring of illegal aliens. If we do so, many will leave our country because no one will hire them.

Also, we must cancel granting automatic citizenship to infants born to illegal aliens, a violation of our 14th Amendment. We then should begin deporting the remaining illegal aliens and encourage them to apply for legal entry and eventual citizenship.

What we must not do is to reward them with amnesty for breaking our laws and compromising our security and sovereignty.

Eugene E. King

Thousand Oaks