Put a 40% or 50% markup on. Is it going to be Pippin Apples? There are a few blacks waiting now. Is it going to be Walnuts? Pampers? No. Anyway, the decisions were openly discussed day in and day out. The highest was a 40% markup. I never heard of that. Really? The 40% markup was on nuts. Oh, really? Well, that was a lower markup than most of... Every store has its structure of markups. And so, I once just took a sheet of groceries, because Bahauddin said, that's cheaper than the co-op... I mean, the green grocery is more expensive than the co-op political stores. And I said, well, I'm going to take two shopping lists, a white middle class list and a black shopping list, and compare the prices. And at that point, which was six or seven months after the store had been opened, the green-gold, and before the political stores, co-ops began to be aware of their political acts, green-gold, green grocery was much cheaper for a black than the co-op stores, because that was the way they had been pricing it.

[01:13]

And literally what they were inadvertently doing, although they talked about it, was they were pricing white middle-class products higher, and the black products lower. How come they? Well, at the time, David Chadwick was running the store most of the time. Well, the statements are made by the people running the store. I'm sort of curious about that. They talk with a lot of people. Roughly, Tencenters' framework is you come into the city, and you live for a while, and you move in a building for a while, and you go to Tuscaloosa for a while, maybe three years, by the time you get around, five years. Then you're on the staff, and then you move to another staff, like at Greenfield here, and then you get to the council. And the council operates in a kind of consensus system based on seniority, and they establish roughly what the market will be, and then all the staff of the store, after you by the way get to this thing, it's not until you've gone through all of that thing that you begin to have responsibility for the practice or meditation.

[02:15]

But that level, those people in the council work with the staff of the bakery and make these decisions together. Do they make decisions as to wages and what businesses you will go into next? Yeah, the only businesses we'll do are the minimum that's necessary to support us, and also ones that are related to what we already do. But some decisions have to be made on what's within that framework. Could you tell us a little bit about the evolution of the businesses and how your decisions were made? how the thing works, and the wave scales, and that's the Boltz department. I'm sort of a homie type of British. Let me come back to something Mike said for a minute. One thing we discovered is we wanted to price things at like 70 cents, 75 cents, 80 cents, 85 cents. A thing priced at, we'd put equal things on 85 cents here, 89 cents here, and the ones for 89 cents would sell the most.

[03:21]

Four cents higher, but if you say 89, people will buy it. It's really crazy. One thing, and again, I'm not criticizing the political, the stores which are more politically motivated, but one thing we don't permit, I mean, for example, I lived on unemployment for a year or so in New York and Hoboken when I was, I don't know, I don't have to explain it all. Anyway, a lot of the stores, which maybe they do charge less, they are willing to have employees who work for nothing because they're getting welfare or ATD or some other source of income. And we won't let that happen. But we are able to do things because of a fairly low wage scale. I mean, actually people don't get paid anything for the most part. They don't get paid anything for the most part. Do people work in the stores? They get paid like $50 a month.

[04:25]

Pardon me? Oh, we don't pay any attention to it. But we don't employ people, if we employ someone outside the community, we'd pay them whatever legally is required. But within the community, most people are sort of on a scholarship. So they get their room board and tuition free, and then they get $25 a month spending money or something like that. And one of the things we're thinking of starting, talking about another business, is what we probably would call a household economy store, which partly I got the feeling of using the word household from your book, Home Inc. And the idea of the household economy, to give you an example of how we think about something, a household economy store we'd like to open in Marin, because only the affluent can afford to save. And at this stage, you have to start somewhere. A store like that opened in San Francisco wouldn't make it probably, but what we'd like to do is to

[05:34]

start with a store which offered anything that made the household economy more productive. So we'd sell tools, wood-burning stoves, books, information about insulating your house, etc. And seed stock and, you know, like if we develop a tomato that grows along the coast here, by planting a lot of tomatoes and picking the best tomato and getting the seeds for next year. We'd sell those seeds and things like that. And so it would be a kind of nursery, hardware, etc. And it's also a lot like the Living Center. And the advantage to us to do something like that is several. One is we could sell our own products. Because we have a small kiln here, we could sell stuff like that. One, we could sell our own products, we could help support ourselves by doing the store, and it could be a buying operation for the very things we need. It could buy for us, wholesale, hardware tools, stuff for the farm, etc., and it would be related to GreenGelt.

[06:38]

Part of the reason we want to do it in Marin is not just affluent thing I said, but really because we would like some expression of green gulch in the community so that we can sell, maybe we might even sell vegetables there in place to have coffee or something. Mainly, and again in the store, we created the store and put the cash register in the middle, not at the door, so there wasn't a them-and-us feeling. You know, you had to go in a shop and then you get past the gate. So we wanted just to make a nice environment for people to walk around and meet each other. Doris crops all the time, it barely breaks even. I think it produced $50 worth of income one month. Generally, it just breaks even. But the bakery, because manufacturing, not retailing, it does pretty well. When you say break even, does that include or not include the wages? It includes the wages. It includes the wages. So it is a self-sufficiency payment. It is self-sufficiency. But they can only take the $25 or so. But no, they can take the full wage, full crop. We add income for their tuition and room and board costs.

[07:46]

It's to the green grocers. The accounting is superb. Kupers and Librand set it up. They impute all costs associated with that store to the store itself. In fact, every function of Green Gulch is imputed to the sources of income. So everything that that grocery store really costs gets imputed to it. including all the student time and administrative time, and very extra time. Are there actual transfers from the store? Yes, daily. One of our main donors, who is the owner of Fidelity Mutual Fund in Boston, he wanted to give us, he didn't want to support us, he's a very puritanical type, wonderful man, very interesting state of mind and how it works. He said he never gives away money, only loans it to people, and they can pay it back to someone else, but they have to pay it back to someone.

[08:48]

And so he said that he turned over the responsibility of worrying about us to his son, and his son said that he didn't want us to be behind this eight ball all the time, and he would try to help us get out of it, but first we had to have really an accounting system which foundations and other people could understand. We've never been given money by a foundation until last year. It may have been partly the result of having this. We did our accounting all right, we kept track of everything, but it's interesting how much it costs. It costs now, I mean, around $40,000 paid to Cooper & Leibman. Cooper & Leibman started out, I think it would be $10,000, but pretty soon, I think they said, we are the most complicated firm or organization they've ever analyzed outside of a conglomerate or a county or something like that. We can make less money more complicated than anyone. Anyway, they completely set up these books and it works very well.

[09:50]

But also we've seen the advantage of when you really pay for service. We've always thrived on free lawyers and etc., or lawyers who work at much lower wages than normal. And if we call up any of our lawyers, even the ones we pay, it takes a week or two to get an answer. What we call a Cooper's migrant, you're paying them $40,000, I suppose you ought to get service. Bango, two hours later you get this analysis and research and a thorough answer of just what you wanted. You can see the advantages of having that kind of money. because we're talking about Zen Center and the foundation, which has a very specific neighborhood foundation specific role, which many groups associated with it might have different roles, but are participating in the same kind of activity. At least the question in my mind is kind of skewed. What I've been worrying about and thinking about is in a way focused by your earlier comment of whether we will be able, by intention, to deal with some of the emerging

[11:03]

or whether we have to wait for the force to promise. And you mentioned the oil crisis, but the one that is most common in most neighborhoods, and I don't know anything about urban, poor, and working class neighborhoods, is housing inflation. And it is dramatic how right around you, not by a law of nature, people are eliminated from any neighborhood that begins to improve. That's right. It's tragic. Well, I don't think it is tragic. And the question it poses to me is, Often we play a role in that, by improving the neighborhood, by starting some self-development, young middle class people come in and buy it, the prices go up, everyone's got to be shut down. And so in fact, our actions, right livelihood or not, are instrumental, often, to say the least, either a sin of omission or maybe a sin of commission, by creating an environment which in fact destroys the lives of lots of people. But many groups, I'm thinking particularly of one that someone raised with me, I think

[12:05]

when he was here in Adams Morgan in Washington, but a very similar phenomenon. I live in that neighborhood. I'm part of the sin, if you like, where people have found that the only way to deal with that reality is much tougher politics than we've been talking about. Confrontation, redlining, fighting the redlining by the banks, demanding certain funding from the developers in the city hall, new arrangements, It takes the kind of politics that, not that the anti-Vietnam War thing is like it, but it isn't a bad sign. And the issue is, I don't think anybody's done it successfully, but what the issue is posed as either, to me, is either by intention we recognize this in advance, or as you said, you got there too late, or in fact, the larger economic... We got there soon enough with too little. We got there soon enough with too little, or too little money. I don't think you can ever do it with money.

[13:08]

Because you can never get enough money to beat the developers at that game. So the only way you can do it is with social commitment and politics. I think if it could be done... Well, in our immediate neighborhood, we could have beat it. Could you? Yeah. Well, if we'd had, say, $100,000, we could have bought up all the key buildings in our neighborhood and kept the neighborhood somewhat depressed. For how long? for as long as we tied up the condominiums that we would then sell with restrictions on speculation. Can you talk about the restrictions on speculation? I'd like to sharpen this because in many neighbors that's certainly not possible. Maybe yours is a special case. It's certainly not possible in many of the neighborhoods of Washington or Boston or Chicago that I don't think about. And the process is rampant and Porter was talking about people being shoved out. And land inflation, which is underlying housing inflation, and speculation and real estate developers, in fact, are destroying entire communities regularly. And I don't know a way around that through what we've been talking about. As I say, maybe it's better to get away from the specific role of the specific foundation to the broader question of the relationship between starting a positive development in the neighborhood and the other effects, the people in the neighborhood.

[14:18]

So I guess my question is broader than to you, but to other people who have experience with this interaction of positive institutional development good cooperatives, new stores, new institutions, and what you do to stabilize and make healthier neighborhoods destroyed by larger forces. It's very much like the oil crisis. Land inflation, housing inflation. Only we participate more directly. Well, it's something we've thought about, of course, all the time. Well, you do. And there's a word which is coincidentally spelled like aware, A-W-A-R-E, which means, it's pronounced in Japanese, aware. And it means the the ability to sustain the constant awareness that you're causing suffering. If you're eating a vegetable or clearing a field, you're doing the insects, you're doing the gophers, or whatever. That if we clean up the neighborhood, we hurt the neighborhood. There's no simple way to ... you can't help. Well, what would more active politics do?

[15:19]

Now, I would not refrain from doing anything I thought was effective. and Buddhism is ... I'd do anything that I thought was effective. I don't care about Buddhism or anything, I just do Buddhism because so far it's proved effective. Really, strictly speaking, there's no Buddhism. In our neighborhood, so far ... but there are some emphases. Our emphasis is relationships with people, building a sort of situation where you can trust each other. So we're trying to do that, and I think every time I come to the point you're talking about, but we had been so lucky, you know, well we started a one-acre park in the neighborhood, now how lucky can you get to move in a neighborhood? Also, you're dealing with ... the city doesn't know quite what they're dealing with when they deal with a Sangha, right?

[16:20]

Shall we say a Sangha community? Because there's been a lot of community groups in San Francisco, but I don't think there's ever been a community group before which one has had the resources, connectives and support from the Trust for Public Land and all kinds of organizations and people all over the place, which not only did we start a park and we got meetings of up to 250 community people together to talk about it and and a committee of 75 people helped design it and actually worked, you know, went down to the architect's office, toured the architect's office, etc. But we were not only able to buy the land, we could have owned the land, we could have maintained the park, we could have designed the park, we could have built the park. And in fact, we had Noguchi Isamu volunteer to design the park for us and put sculpture in it, etc. Now, generally, the city This is one of the reasons that, going back to the political power, normally the city can kind of tokenize any community group because the community group can only go so far.

[17:25]

The fact that we were able to do everything that normally the city government is able to do, they still don't know quite what happened, you know, and immediately thought they made as sure as they could that we didn't design the park or build the park. They didn't want us to have that kind of control. There are other reasons, but that's, I think, fundamental reasons. the city, the park and rec. And it's just an intuitive protection of your own bailiwick, you know, sort of bureaucratic bailiwick. As far as redlining, we've been concerned with that, but then ... Yeah, we did get the community to design the park. And we got the architect in a place where he then just executed the community's design. pretty good, and luckily we got the community sophisticated enough to do a design which worked. We have a new problem, but I won't go into that.

[18:26]

When we get to that, so far our experiences, and you see it's a little difficult for me to respond, because so far our experience has so reinforced the way we do things, because, okay, we're concerned about redlining. Before we know it, Governor Brown shows up, excuse me. Anyway, he shows up quite a bit to get out of the context of Sacramento. We'd, excuse me for saying so, welcome Nixon, if he came too. And in fact, Bob Gaines and I were discussing, we decided Nixon was a great Bodhisattva. He has amused us for a couple of years. He had got a better relationship with China going, detente with Russia. He exposed the FBI, you know, he exposed the CIA, something Kennedy never did, and he, by sacrificing himself, exposed the corruption of the presidency. So, anyway, we'd welcome Nixon, you know, if he came too. Anyway, Governor Brown shows up, he talks about, he's interested in the neighborhood, he goes around the city, he talks about redlining all the time, and part of the context of seeing our neighborhood resulted in state things about redlining.

[19:37]

Pink Palace, when he went over there and spent the night in the Pink Palace, he spent the evening sort of planning it in our house first and went over. And Tony Frank, who's head of the ... Pink Palace is one of the worst housing projects in the city, near us. And when Tony Frank, who's head of Citizen Savings and Loan, is considered about the best person in Savings and Loan, we go in to see him and he says, I named several things like, we need this, we want to do that, we want to figure out a way to condominiumize this, we want to consolidate some loans. He says, fine. He says, what next? So we run out. We've got to start planning for next year. I mean, this is, what are we going to do? So we've got so much reinforcement from that, that we're doing as much as we have the physical time for doing, at least. Now, if we thought, if I saw a way to get Stuart Brand elected mayor, well, I'd probably work on it. I don't know if Stuart would welcome it.

[20:41]

I don't know, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I can't. But I'd do anything that I thought was effective. That's what I'm saying, that the case would be so special because of the special circumstances of the other cases. There's a parallel, which draws upon the example, may not reach the same conclusion. That's what the paradox is for. That's the problem, yes. I would guess that if you do emphasize as much as possible working with people and not go in some kind of, you know, plan and sacrificing things for the ... you know, one reason we won't have people in welfare working in the stores unless they really legitimately deserve welfare and there's no other alternative for them, because it doesn't seem ... it seems like a justifying an end which we don't feel comfortable with. So we're willing to sacrifice the end Because right now, I don't know, I'm not worried about the future. I can't get involved with the future. I got to take care of the present.

[21:42]

Are people being forced out of the neighborhood? Yes. Significantly? Are you losing the community? Well, we have one advantage. That's, in some sense, the problem. There's no community. We would like there to be a community, but it may be that before there's a community, the community that might have been will be gone. Evacuate. The closest thing we've come to a... Typical situation. The closest thing we've come to a heavy confrontation is, well, we've had a couple. One is, we were trying to close, because the community asked us to write the letters and work it out, close the worst drug bar in the city. There were four murders in the month we were considering it in front of the door, plus all kinds of stuff. The grocery store we had, by the way, had three murders in it. lots of robberies, and it was all boarded up when we opened it back up again. And so we were going to close this place, and in fact my wife, who's president of the Neighborhood Foundation, she was writing the letter.

[22:45]

She does a lot of the letter writing, somebody named Renee, for the neighborhood, and the housing project near us has the, what's now said by the housing authority, the only effective Tenants Association in the city. And it's only because Virginia and Renee and the Director of the Neighborhood Foundation go regularly. Every time there's a meeting they go and they're always in there and they've established some continuity. So the concept of the Neighborhood Foundation is that some organization, a school, church, bank, can establish the continuity necessary without only offering continuity and have the other things start to, well, when she was ready to send the letter, And we were at least wise enough to send it to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board in Los Angeles, ABC. A person near us who was head of the Head Valley Community Group sent his letter to close a much tiny bar involved in the same stuff for the same reason. The next day after he sent the letter to the ABC there was a $1,500 contract out in his life.

[23:47]

So, there's leaks all over the place, you can't do anything. So, he was beaten up very seriously, put in the hospital, had a bodyguard, and then a while later the community center was burned out. And we've had a number of arson threats. And you know, it's interesting, if the French government will back down on that Arab terrorist because of oil or whatever, or threats of bombs, you know, almost anyone will back down. When you have so much dynamite and guns around, the ante is so high that anybody who's willing to raise the ante up to poking your eyes out has a tremendous amount of power. So in our neighborhood we've found that there's certain tacit neighborhood rules. For instance, none of our cars are almost never broken into or robbed on the street. Strangers' cars parked overnight will be broken into. How do they know which car is which? Beats me. as long as we stay in our immediate neighborhood and establish our territory and if somebody comes in there we'd blow whistles and chase them and I don't have my whistle, I have this wonderful whistle that's made in Japan, you push it and it's ear-shattering.

[25:00]

But as soon as we move into the neighborhood, up two blocks away, and we start saying, well there shouldn't be this or that there, there's arson threats on us, etc. Now the only, in that kind of confrontation, the only other confrontation we've had There's been some other minor ones. Another one was that really made a big difference in the neighborhood. When we started getting the park together, we couldn't figure out why everybody was scared to participate and wouldn't meet. And finally, we uncovered that there was this guy who lived near us, related to some important community movers in the city, and one of the heads of EOC, Education, whatever it is, Economic Opportunity Council. He had a grip on the neighborhood. Every time something happened in the neighborhood, he made sure nobody knew about it but him, and he went and took the press credit for it. And finally, he came up to us. I didn't get the message, I'm sort of innocent, you know, I always expect the best of people, and I like the man, you know, he's quite nice. First he came up and he told us how to set up, and I said, half-joking, how to set up daycare centers where we could earn $2,000 a month by taking it off the top.

[26:10]

He said, how do you think I, you know, He had a daycare center in Berkeley where he takes $2,000 a month for himself. He was going to show us how to support ourselves by opening daycare centers, how you finagle it and you have some people. So then a few weeks later I went to see him with two black people and he finally said, you know, you guys are kind of cutting me out of the neighborhood. Now that park is going to be a million dollars, you know, and you guys are taking, I know you're going to cut me out. You're going to get the money. You've got to cut me back in. You're going to get the money. You've got to cut me back in. I'm head of this neighborhood." I was really amazed. And then he went into this whole song and dance about, you know, I'm a good guy and everybody likes me but I'm always getting under the table. And he wanted to control who the contractor was and who the bids were and then you get a cut back. So why nobody was coming to meetings is he was threatening everybody in the neighborhood that if they worked for EOC they'd lose their jobs and anybody connected with any of the food conspiracies would have their grants cut off if they attended any of the meetings.

[27:23]

So everybody was scared, I mean people were weeping and everything. Okay, so we devised, this is the only real confrontation we had, we devised on the day that we took all the neighborhood down to the, bused them down to the architect's office, and a lot wouldn't come and were scared to come, etc. We arranged a meeting which was a community indictment of him for intimidating black women. And the hidden agenda was the money, but we didn't mention that. And we had a real scene. It was just like something out of a movie. We met in a bar on Fillmore Street, and there was a gas fireplace, you know, and one great big Japanese guy at the bathroom door, and another black guy at the thing, and another two black guys out in the street sort of covering us. And he came in with a lieutenant, and I was the only white person. And there was this... and he came with this guy. My only participation was that I said we'd supply lawyers and public, you know, sort of exposure of anybody he fired and to protect their jobs.

[28:26]

But everybody else was into, you know, he jumped up and several people got around him, etc. and they charged him and he backed down and he's been no influence in the neighborhood ever since and he's trying to sell his house. We tried to then work with him. Then he called me a racist and all kinds of stuff, right? But as soon as we broke that barrier and had that confrontation, the entire neighborhood came out and started attending meetings and et cetera. I should stress that it isn't so much an interest. I think the issue of confrontation is not so much at stake here. But I think that in any sense, the solution to the problem, in this case, urban land values and housing, requires governmental action. You're right. And the question if I can help you in any way, I will. Well, no, it's the question is how one faces that. That's what I mean by the word politics, that it's going to require either a legal action against speculation or some support for funding. So low income housing or capital grants or land grants, all these things being done in various communities I know about.

[29:30]

And to get to make that happen, which is public policy. to deal with the erosion of the neighborhood requires some sort of active participation in the public. Confrontation in some communities is totally useless. It's worse than useless. It's counterproductive. So my question is not about that, but whether that... Well, I can only ask from our own strategies and tactics, you know. And our approach is primarily non-governmental. We try to actually say, to heck with the government. We'll try to do it ourselves, you know. And we work with the Trust for Public Land a lot, who Huey Johnson started, which is non-governmental. and tries to push the Department of Interior around, often successfully, and has gotten two square mile parks, started in Los Angeles, and lots of little pieces of urban land and HUD land. Anyway, that's something that I'm involved in thinking about with Huey, but... So I guess we try all the non-governmental approaches we can, and if there's a way we can... The problem in our neighborhood is that as long... For the most part, it comes down to, okay, we could change the laws, but for the most part, as long as the individual will sell his house, if you offer him enough money, you're finished.

[30:58]

I mean, if there's in Japan that wouldn't happen, there's enough of a community, you could come in, you could offer anybody almost anything, and they'd say, well, I live here, my grandfather, but as long as, if we create a thing and some real estate person can come in and say, look, I'll pay you $120, then you can start busting the whole thing. So the only thing we have, and we have some lawyers working on it, is to try to devise a document which will prevent that. This is a non-government, now we've tried, we've been offered money by the state government to do things and work with the state, but it's just too complicated, it's easier to do it simply now. I think we have to change laws, but I don't know, and I'm not a... I don't... It's clear to me that you can't resolve the problem one way or the other, and the question is if you can put them together in a new form. I suppose if I really, I would run for office, I don't have time to do that. But I'm glad you're doing it, I depend on you. I'm getting out of it, I'm sorry.

[32:00]

You tell me what you want me to do and I'll try. Let me give you some history. I started 11 years ago, I set up something with a group of other people called the Cambridge Institute in Cambridge and the Center for Community Economic Development. Its only concern was non-governmental development. You know the black guy who did that for a while? Yes, named DeForest Brown. Yeah, I think so. He came out and visited us and stayed with us for a while. All it does is community cooperatives, neighborhood housing projects, land trusts, food co-ops. It's a center for both of us. What we encountered time and again And community after community is that the very best things that were being done would get eroded by the fact that they had no way to deal with the public control of larger parameters. And that unless we, it's exactly why I came to what I'm now doing, unless we could do both, we lost our best things. Or they became counterproductive. They made the neighborhood so nice that the young middle class took it over.

[33:00]

That's exactly what happens. So that it's that level. I'm not trying to say that you need to do it. I'm saying that that's our common problem. That's what's happening, right. Exactly. And what to do about it? Yes, I interrupted you, Porter. I want to talk about, I know Porter is going to talk about it in more detail than I am. But theoretically, I think it's interesting what's happening here. You see, the interesting thing about this meeting is that here's somebody who from a spiritual base, if you will, and there's somebody from kind of a government or policy base, doesn't seem, doesn't hear that what we're all here about is there's a new kind of developer trying to happen too. who comes onto the scene with both of the concerns that you're talking about. Porter's a fairly good example. I'm a good example. I'm trying to really train entrepreneurs to go into entrepreneurship with a different quality of concern that has been available in the marketplace before. And I think one of the most important things we can do here while we're all here is to figure out how the new entrepreneur can be told he can really work in this area.

[34:03]

They care a lot. I now give you Porter a break after that intersection. Do you hear what I'm saying, Courtney? Sure, yeah. I don't really have anything to say, because there's a whole, there's a lot of different ways to do it. And I think that San Francisco is, in many ways, is an aberrant city. It's like New York and Boston. You mentioned New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco. I mean, those are, those are our most aberrant cities, and they're, they're, probably what people in most of the East Coast and West Coast think, they're between aberrant or black. They're aberrant. They're, they're, they're non-recurring. They are, they're mutants. I mean, the American, I mean, this is valueless to try to describe them in terms like that. They're not, I mean, there are many, many, many hundreds of cities and neighborhoods where things can be done. And in my own work, in the last four and a half or five years, I've been traveling around other business regions, but while I've been in cities, I've been going in and just empirically watching

[35:08]

what they're doing. All I want to say is, I don't want to go into how it's done, I just want to tell you that there is a vast network of neighborhood development people, medium-offering, commercial, entrepreneurial, who are doing extraordinary things. In fact, I'm publishing a magazine, it starts in September and the first issue we're doing a story on The subject which we're discussing, that is, what happens when a neighborhood develops is that the low-income people always, to some degree, get displaced. and what people are doing about it. Just last week, that's what I've been to the majority of the week, I've talked to people around the country and there's a guy named Westmoreland in Cincinnati and a guy named Ziegler in Pittsburgh. I can give you a whole long list of them who have done some things to deal with this problem. They didn't have the mafia and the highly organized union activity you've got in San Francisco. But there's just not enough time here to go into it. It's not germane to what everybody's interested in. But we can talk about it. For those of you interested in community development, I can wire you in.

[36:13]

What's the magazine? It's called American Preservation. It's called a magazine for historic and neighborhood preservation. Reporter, I need to ask you something, because just yesterday you told me that you knew the Washington case, Adams-Morgan. It was the first time you'd ever heard of anyone making a successful dent on the erosion problem of the Tennessee. using a local ordinance which is just strikingly unique. The Adams Morgan thing is a circumstance where they have a law in Washington, D.C. which says that when a neighborhood, in so many words it says this, when a neighborhood is going through redevelopment that the tenants have the first right of refusal to buy the property. And they just took a court to case in a neighborhood housing corporation of a non-profit character and They're going to force the developers, their ballast property, to give the tenants a period of time to buy the property. Well, Gar's reaction to that was, well, they'll never get the money.

[37:13]

But my reaction to that statement was, well, Given the leadership, listen, there's a lot of people in this country that are committed to doing good works who got a lot of bread. And people here in this room, I mean, I've read about Stuart Brand and Michael Phillips and Richard Baker, and you guys have got access to people, and so do I. And we can raise tons of money for something that's right livelihood, and we don't have to call it right livelihood, but you go to people who have made a lot of money, and they're almost always, there's a common denominator of these people, and that is that they want to do something good. I mean, give someone a chance, and they'll do good works. There'll be a lot of people trying to help him get his car started or something. And it's the same people who've got a lot of bread. So what's coming upon us and this people in this room here, ostensibly at least, who are people dedicated to right livelihood and their endeavors, is to take an entrepreneurial role and go out and find money to help these people do it. And I could do it if I were in Washington. I could do it. And I know the other people who could, because you've got names which precede you.

[38:14]

Each of us who has been a success has a track record that we can market in connection with another project, unrelated to our activities, and we can disassociate ourselves from profit. We can do extraordinary things. So, I mean, it seems to me that to sit here and talk about these things, I mean, It's almost a pedantic academic exercise, because I can give you a list of ways to deal with this thing, because I've done it. I'm just going to say that flat out, and if it sounds like, again, like I said last night, a case of blind hubris, well, so be it, but I don't think I can. I think in your case, though, you're setting up what seems to me to be an artificial relationship between the people who have the bread and those who don't. and it's not out to be a viable ongoing kind of a situation. I don't agree with you. I'll tell you there are thousands of foundations, there are hundreds of wealthy people in this country who want someone who is capable to come to them and say, I've got an idea. I'll tell you, I've got a modicum of it. Well, and very seldom people come to my office and say, I've got an idea about anything.

[39:18]

When somebody comes in and says, I've got an idea, and here's the way it works, and sit down with a little bit of enthusiasm and say, this is what we can do, here's the problem, and here's poor people, most people respond, I've raised a ton of money on deals like that. You've got to go to people and appeal to their higher instincts because it's there. It's there. That's what I said last night, I mean, I just have this abiding optimism, and if you can go on and say something like that, you can really get it. I really, I mean, I think I can prove it, and I will. You have an optimism, I think, which is, excuse me for saying so, I have the most characteristic of people from the middle of the country. And I know when I lived in Indiana for years, and I went to Boston, you know, nobody stopped and helped anybody when their car was stuck in the snow. In the Midwest, everyone stops, at least when I lived there, and my wife's from Minneapolis. And what you're talking about, boy, the foundations are in there, rich people are in there helping, there's community development, there's buildings. It's just not the same in San Francisco.

[40:19]

One reason all the corporations are owned by stockholders, not individuals. And on the East Coast, I mean, there's a kind of sophistication and I don't know, it's just different. We can't raise money the way you say. And in the Midwest, where we go to people who have that spirit, they say, well, we're interested in Minneapolis, we're interested in St. Louis or something. I'm unconvinced too. I'm unconvinced. I was at lunch the day before I came out here and I was about to go to lunch and I had to go to the airport and a guy comes up and he said, oh gee, I thought you were on your way to San Francisco. I wouldn't have introduced myself. I was sent here from San Francisco by Mike Murphy to meet you. And I said, oh, what do you do? And he said, I've got a real estate business in a bank. And I said, Mike Murphy sent me a guy from a real estate business in a bank? I said, oh, you're into redlining, eh? He said, well, in a sense, he said, I just opened a bank in the biggest redline district in San Francisco. And I said, why'd you do that? He said, well, my real estate business was so successful. This guy looked like a hippie. He's 31 years old. And he says, my real estate business was so successful, I had a lot of money, I really wanted to do something, so I opened a bank in a redline neighborhood. And it's called the, probably for your foundation, the Neighborhood Savings Bank.

[41:22]

You know this guy? I never met this guy. So when I got out here I called Mike, I said, who is this guy? I missed him at lunch. Well, who is your friend? He said, he's a fascinating guy. He's made an enormous amount of money. He really wants to do good in San Francisco. He's opened a bank. There you are, Porter. He's one of my closest friends and he hasn't told me about it. What he said, I've called Terry ten times. Or maybe get a little bit more right, I'll ask you. But they do exist, I agree with Porter, I find them every place, I find them in New York City, try that. Another problem here and that is that, I mean, you know Travis Price's thing in New York, because that sort of seems to me to combine a whole lot of things into a more rather than the wealthy coming in and buying something or making it available a little lower. They've had a combination of confrontation. They had a community organizer come in, in the Lower East Side, one of the worst neighborhoods. Most people here probably know about this example. And the city was about to tear down a house which it had condemned.

[42:25]

And so the first thing they did was to get the group of people in the neighborhood to persuade the city to give the house, in its terrible condition, to this group of people who agreed then. to put their own sweat and labor into building this house for themselves as a place to live. So they were totally committed and giving their selves into this. Now this took a lot of community organizing, but it was done on a very low income. It was a condemned house. They took it, okay. Then the next step was to really confront the city on making a sweat equity mortgage available to these people. Now that was a real political effort. They really had to march on the city hall and do all sorts of things. And so that, in comes the politics. They got that and they went to work and they started out with 18 and they ended up with 12, a lot of the Puerto Rican, I think, neighborhood. And in the meantime, the people that worked on that building learned to craft. They learned, because in comes Travis Price at this point, I don't know who the community organizer's name was to begin with, who's a solar wind man.

[43:32]

So they were learning how to use solar and wind in the middle of New York City. and they built this thing and it's now become a terrifically successful example because the people in this particular house are now helping other houses in the same really dilapidated street to remake other houses that were about to be condemned. They've become kind of expert helpers to other people. So now they have a crafter working. Not only that, it then confronted Con Edison because the windmill up there was making so much electricity at certain times of the week or days that it was sending electricity back into the electrical systems. So they took Con Edison and his lawsuit against Con Edison because communism wouldn't run the meter backwards. They won the suit, which is a kind of nice suit to win, and they are now being credited for the electricity they generate. What I like about that example is that it was working right within the neighborhood to make a self-sufficiency of the people involved, so that that then builds on itself to go forward,

[44:46]

rather than to just keep reducing prices or giving lumps of money. I mean, I just think that the whole thing is kind of integrated in that example in a very sound way. And I think that 11th Street is one of the most exciting places I've been lately. It's just walking up and down 11th Street on the Lower East Side of New York. It takes a lot of social skills to do that, though. Terrific. Yeah, no, you had to have a very skilled community organizer. And it's very interesting that no government government organization would give, I mean HUD wouldn't give, nobody would give, the only community service funded that project to begin with. And even the technology of Travis Price was finally funded by CSA. Is that right? Have I got my initials right? Was funded by CSA. And only now are some of the alternate, I mean, you know, Erda or HUD or places like that beginning to look at this place.

[45:47]

We were offered a building. We ended up with the control of a building in the city, which is an old synagogue and kind of the Venetian Victorian building. And we decided to use it as a way to train people in insulating buildings in the neighborhood and rehabbing Victorians and things like that. and we applied for CETA money, you know what that is, to create jobs in the neighborhood and pay them. So we wrote the proposal and the unions came down on us so hard that they made the state government back off and say they're running an apprentice program. And the unions in San Francisco are really, I mean all somebody did a while ago is fix a pipe in an emergency to a hospital for the kidney machines, what are they called? Yeah, anyway, to fix the water pipe to it and so this plumbing contractor came forward during a plumbing strike and fixed this pipe which had been sabotaged by the plumbing union and for fixing it the redwoods on his property were cut down, his truck was bombed twice and people shot through his windshield.

[46:55]

Yeah, it's that. So we know who's doing it and etc. But as John Maher says, who's head of Delancey Street, the only way to survive in San Francisco, you've got to cut a deal. And so finally we've got, and this is a moral question for us, you know, like finally we rewrote the whole thing so that the state is willing to avoid confrontation with the unions as long as we can get John Maher or somebody to, so to speak, cut a deal with the union. They owe him a favor and he'll say, lay off those kids, you know, those Zen kids with the shaved heads. So we may be able to do it, but everything we've tried like that, it's really ... and then to just get ... we need $40,000 for the materials. Well, Virginia and Renee and Kim Kaiser and others, who are pretty skillful people, they work all year round, writing proposals and talking to people. They can ... Nehru Foundation, the Zen Center covers it, you know, $5,000, $6,000 a year at least, because it just doesn't make it. We get money from you for your birthday once, right?

[48:00]

Something like that? $1,000 or $500? Do you do that, brother? What's that? He used to be the head of the Irwin Sweeney Miller Foundation. And his parting gift as he ran out the door was to send a birthday present or something to us. This is the nuts and bolts. This is the nuts and bolts. OK, great. Well, it seems to me that for some entrepreneur writer type in the crowd here, that it would make a good book. you know, to collect some of these models together. Maybe it's already been done. Maybe I'm just... Has it? Yeah, I can go for it. There's a number of really good, very good stuff on the National Endowment for the Arts and the Neighborhood Services Administration and the Urban Reinvestment Task Force. Well, what I'm thinking of is, for example, there are obviously different ways to approach different neighborhoods and different... Yeah, and so, like, whether you work with the What Gar was talking about, the outside, the political structure, how you can do that, I mean, for example, now Sam Brown, as head of action, has appointed a woman named Marge Tobanken to be the head of VISTA.

[49:11]

And Marge is talking about setting up training center models all over the country connected with VISTA, which to me is very exciting, offers some very exciting potential for what can happen. And then the Peace Corps directorship is still open, but maybe something of that sort on an international level too, I mean, means that a lot of the New Age kinds of things, this connecting of the spiritual and the political or whatever, which really I don't see as a basic dichotomy, but has seemed to have sort of developed that way in many places, that seems to me like that's an exciting way that it could come together with at least one branch of the government, which is very exciting to me. Is Chris still open? What? Is Chris still open? Well, there's some guy named Martin Dease who's, I don't know, apparently is very interested in the job. Now, I don't know what's going to happen on that, but I'm going to be, I have an appointment to talk with Sam next, next week. But, um.

[50:14]

Martin's the head of Vista. Yeah. Yeah. I think, at least I, Let's say that as far as this general discussion or something, I'm willing to respond to anything more, but I think that we've talked enough about right livelihood from the Buddhist point of view and our examples of trying to develop a strategy that works. I have one question. In your relationships with the people that are around and that you interact with and come together, who are they? How much have you learned about them? How well do you know them? Pretty well. We get invited to their, I mean, we're involved in everything.

[51:17]

Is that Porter? We'll give another example of aberration. We're involved to the extent for instance that we get called up in the middle of something where a black woman who was in prison for murder for 10 years gets out of prison, her husband's been waiting for her, she comes home and her husband's been waiting for 10 years for her, she comes in the door, they spend the afternoon together, he goes in the bathroom, he's leaning over the tub to draw a tub, she stabs him in the back and as she stabs him in the back she says, Now what will you tell the hospital?" Then she goes over to a friend of ours house in the projects and pulls out a gun with a silencer and says she's going to snuff her out and but then she puts the gun down and starts weeping saying, I'm not a whore and right in the midst of that we get called, God I'm so nervous I need meditation.

[52:33]

or something like that. So Ginny and Renee go up and try to calm the situation out and the man gets to the hospital, he never tells the hospital what happened. I mean the things that happen in our neighborhood are unreported, I mean they're so unredeemed, I mean there's been no novelist of the black ghetto, partly maybe there's no redeeming thing, the numbers of stuff like that that we know about weekly And often we're the only confidence, they don't dare tell anyone else because pretty soon you get retaliation, you know. And so there's a lot of craziness and guns and a whole bunch of stuff that we're involved in plus weddings and divorces and we go to parties. How do they see you? I'm not anywhere near as involved as my wife and Renee, but I would guess that Ginny Renee, for instance, are now on more boards, the only white people on more black boards than any other, by far, than any other white people in the city that I know about.

[53:39]

They're just accepted. because they go and they go and they just do and if there's a meal you know like a potluck meal they make the meal the same as everybody else and they clean the room and paint the stuff and etc. So we're pretty involved with the people I'd say that we most actively work with the black neighborhood leaders and not the ordinary folk should we say but we're involved with the first so-called ordinary folk too you know. Does that answer your question? Well it's the beginning. Yeah. We're involved as we have physical time to see, because most other groups like the Shri Srinivasa or other meditative groups really cop out, I find. They basically cop out and sort of go on on their own and spend their life in seclusion. I don't know. Well, you see, again, from the point of view of Buddhism, the idea is service, as Stuart said, but the average person in the neighborhood, they don't want to meditate, you know, right? They want their stairs painted or their basement cleaned or something like that.

[54:39]

So the Neighborhood Foundation was set up to do that. Then, if you'll forgive me for saying so, the average intelligent, talented person doesn't want to meditate either. They've got too much going for them in other realms, so we start the WeWrite Center where they can come and talk and meet and etc. So people who aren't going to meditate, this is Neighborhood Foundation, but just so we can do something with people, whether it's leaders like you guys or the neighborhood people, and I say yes. Yesterday someone said, we don't really have a tradition of friendship and relationships. We don't have a tradition of relationships. because what's now evolving is a word for what friendship means. And part of the Zen Center's relationship with your peers does strike me as one of a very distinct concept of friendship.

[55:42]

Not just the people next door, but whether it's Mr. Johnson in Boston, or the wife of a famous poet who's an alcoholic and has to come and live with the community, Well, immunity does have an absolute distinct function. There's a couple of things that come in there. There's a background which in Buddhism, which recommends sympathetic joy, which means that you don't just take pleasure in getting, you know, it's not like competitive where you take pleasure in your being better than someone else. You take pleasure in other people's success. to the extent that you make more an effort to make them a success than yourself or equally. So that the sense of sympathetic joy which goes along with unlimited another thing is recommended unlimited friendliness is that you just are friendly to people. But in the sense of community community has nothing to do with friendship. Is that we're not in Zen Center we're not friends particularly and we would never know each other outside of Zen Center.

[56:47]

If we have common goals So what you try to do in a community, whether it's what I see a lot of Japanese village life, is they have common goals, they've got to survive, marriages stay together when there's an economic necessity, better I think, it's a common goal. And what we try to establish is not with somebody's friendship, where we might go to the movies together or something, but a sense of a common goal, which it may be a higher common goal like everybody gets enlightened or something, but we try to establish common goals and not friendships. So if you're friendly too, that's fine. Well, friendship has such different meanings to different people, so it's interesting that definition of sympathetic joy is quite similar to Thomas Aquinas' view of friendship. There isn't much difference. To wish someone well. But it seems to me in service, one of the problems I find in service, my own and others, is there are levels of service.

[57:52]

In terms, there are things that people can service, coffee and tea, which is a very nice service and can be appreciated very easily. There are other kinds of service which, for example, when I first went to Mexico and went into a village, I had a view of what service was in terms of helping people. I discovered that as I really began to understand them, not in my own terms of what but in their terms and not just in terms of individuals but in terms of the whole social system and in terms of what the pressures were coming from the sugar refinery onto what crops people grew and how that system related to what happened to the culture and who was gaining power. The idea of service, what service I could do even to an individual changed.

[58:56]

It had to do with knowing him and who he was and what that whole society was. The Buddhist idea of service as expressed in Japan often is to not interfere with people, to let them make their own mistakes, to give them the space to make their own mistakes, but to watch them considerably and carefully. So they don't give you any help, but they're always noticing. and watching, etc. So that's, I think, a similar idea of service. And if you add in watching them in a penetrating way, I think that would be very similar. That's the idea. What about... Like you do with a child. And one of the words for love in Chinese, it means, the deeper word means to watch. Isn't there also some participation, frustrating somebody who is demeaning themselves or you or others that you You may not stop them, but you may participate in some way that would frustrate somebody's demeaning behavior.

[59:58]

Well, I don't know. I guess there's a generalization in terms of people you practice with, you might. I don't know, you know, if you were senior enough, you might. But I don't know if, like in the neighborhood, we'd do something like that. Maybe we would. I'd have to think of an example. What about the little black girl that you were talking about last year who was going around destroying the trees on the street with the two little kids? Oh, that's... I get in the midst of that stuff and it's like the Vietnam War. I mean, that was not simply a tent of watching on your part. I mean, you couldn't figure out what to do, but... Well, I can give you an example if you want. He's talking about, I think, the time this little girl was directing these boys to cut the trees down and we'd say something to her and she couldn't do anything. Well, the problem I alluded to about the park is these, particularly, it's interesting, the little girls have been the main instigators.

[60:58]

I kind of, you know, some of them are a little bit demented, I think. I mean, literally, I mean, there's something wrong with them. They're about 11 or 12 and very fat, you know, and they instigate the boys, you chicken, and they've used the park now as a launching platform because it's raised for stones, missiles, everything onto the street. They're breaking windows, they've nearly killed people, I mean big two-by-fours just missing people. And they're accurate, something should be recruited for a baseball team and one of them hit me, well the distance from here to the Zendo on the other side from way up in the park to the front of the building in 300 feet with a stone almost as big as a baseball. You go up there and try to do something, you talk to them, I didn't do anything mister, I didn't see, you know, you can't talk about the park, you got the park started, you did something, you know, it's a nice place, you know, let's take care of it. They just deny it, right, they deny it to your face that they're doing anything. We didn't do anything and you can't touch them, you can't touch the kids and everything, it'd be real hell to pay.

[62:02]

The parents sometimes will sit there and watch and then you turn your back and they throw stones at you and you turn around again The only solution we've discovered so far, you can't call the police, the police won't do anything. The parents won't do anything. You can't go up and threaten, that doesn't do any good. The solution, and we've tried for a while taking pictures with one camera and then we get arson threats. If we sort of filmed people who were casing the neighborhood. Now we have a lot of people armed with cameras. And 10 or 15 people will all go out and surround the park and move in with cameras. And all start taking pictures. And the kids hide and they run. That's been the most effective thing. So if we collect enough photographs, we then can turn them over.

[62:55]

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