San Francisco’s Public Works general services budget is around $400 million. It doubled in the past decade.

Here, a city supervisor is saying they’re not even using it, but instead, working with private business groups and low-paid non-union contractors. https://twitter.com/MattHaneySF/status/1345082480471068672

In San Francisco, this is outsourced to a company called Block by Block, that is effectively privatizing city services in hundreds of cities.

And managed by city tax-funded private corporations called Community Benefit Districts that have no labor contracts or city liabiliy.

Block by Block is replaces city services like policing and sanitation, but without labor contracts or city liability for violating civil rights.

You're still paying for those with taxes, too. But they're pitched as overburdened/incompetent, and privatization fills the gap.

Block by Block is part of this phenomenon of replacing local governance and local city services with a tax-funded corporation that operates nationally.

It's owned by a SMS Holdings. Its other divisions contract for TSA screenings and corporate building security and maintenance.

This is just so bizarre. Community Benefit Districts are corporations sanctioned by the city to assess their own publicly-enforced taxes.

They turn neighborhoods into private fiefdoms controlled by businesses and landlords. This is from the Castro.

http://castrocbd.org/about-the-cbd/ 

Here's a new one being enacted in downtown SF last year. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Downtown-SF-businesses-to-tax-themselves-to-pay-14104083.php

Violating civil rights? Not a problem for Block by Block.

Here's a video they produced showing their clearing people off public sidewalks to a soundtrack of AC/DC's Back in Black.

https://www.facebook.com/139262252764503/videos/1049119738812459

Another thing CBDs are doing is increasingly sophisticated networked private surveillance.

Thread here. The Castro CBD, Union Square, Japantown, and others are allowing a Bitcoin dude to place cameras for his surveillance startup called Safe City. https://twitter.com/mayavada/status/1335873573257244672