[sfbayview] Find a FRIENDLY buyer for the Bay View Building

[Jalili]

Dear friends, we need your help.

The beautiful, lovingly restored little building with a flat upstairs where we live and work and three storefronts on Third Street at the main intersection in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco's Black heartland, will be sold on the auction block on the steps of City Hall on Tuesday unless a 30-60-day postponement we've requested is approved.

Even so, we need to find a FRIENDLY buyer quick, someone who will let us stay here, manage the property and, if they're planning to improve it, will count us in at some level so we can build back up, get a strong, exciting website where everything works and bring back the Bay View paper asap, at least as a monthly. We fought valiantly to keep the property; sale is the last resort. At best, we'll get very little out of a sale - we'll get nothing at all if the property is auctioned.

To see the listing of the Bay View Building for sale and a couple of photos, click here: MLS SFAR Reports (513) Please remind anyone who's interested that, though the real estate market is in the doldrums right now, this is the part of San Francisco that buyers are looking to. It's called gentrification, you know. That's why we need a FRIENDLY buyer - one who will work with us to strengthen the community, not drive us all out.

A good friend said she thinks most Bay View supporters don't realize that we're losing the property because it's what kept the Bay View in publication for the past 10 years and now the equity is gone. Let me try to give you a thumbnail sketch of how it happened. The story won't be unfamiliar to those of you trying to survive in any Black community under siege. We can't let the bad guys win!

Ten years ago, when the City put Willie Ratcliff’s Liberty Builders (which subsidized the Bay View for its first six years) and all the other Black contractors out of business, Willie found a partner to help us buy this century-old building. It had been boarded up for 15 years and anyone else would have demolished it, but Willie lovingly restored it to more than its original glory. His work, along with the real estate boom, raised the value nearly 10-fold, allowing us to keep printing the paper by dipping into the equity to augment income from ads and your subscriptions and donations.

Refinancing was always at least a year-long battle, every loan more predatory than the one before. To avoid the need for more equity, we kept trying to increase the Bay View's revenue - while cutting costs to the bone, with most of the content volunteered - but the Black paper known as the most radical in the country isn't the choice of many advertisers. And a while back, the mayor of San Francisco had every one of our advertisers called and threatened.

That's how we got in this fix. So now let me tell you some good news: We should soon have a website that really functions and where we can post new stories daily and most if not all of the thousands of archived stories that people search for all the time. A pair of web designers Sharon Martinas met in New Orleans - one who just earned his master's from UC Berkeley - have volunteered to put up a site for the Bay View FOR FREE! They've promised to teach me how to maintain it, and I'll teach you how to post stories so we can get all that great content back.

That's another reason we need a FRIENDLY buyer who will let us stay here. I don't know how we'd run the website from under a bridge.

At our ages, 75 and 69, some would think we'd be ready to pack up and go where we could live on our little social security checks. But we want to stay in the struggle and believe we have a lot more to give, to teach and to leave behind.

We've recently been reminded of our mortality though. Two weeks ago, Willie got hit with pneumonia and was hospitalized for the first time in his 75 years. Then once he was home, I got sick and have been flat on my back since Monday. (I get sick so rarely that we never missed a scheduled issue of the Bay View for 16 1/2 years; that's 697 editions and I edited every word and loved every minute of all it took.) We're recovering now and out of bed for short periods, but it's oh so slow. Our being sick is what prevented us from putting out this plea sooner. Thanks to all who have wished us well and may I ask that you also wish Willie a happy 76th year on Sept. 18.

One more thing, dear friends: No one has ever surpassed the Minister of Information JR in contributions and dedication to the Bay View newspaper. Yet he is the only regular contributor who had no other source of income. What we could give him wasn't much but he stretched it to support himself and two little ones - he's an adoring father. He never complains, and he'll probably be furious to see this.

Please, everybody, be on the lookout for a temporary job or project or gig of some kind for JR. His skills and talents are excellent and abundant - radio, writing, photography - somebody with some money must need his help. He gives so much! All those incredible Block Reports you hear on the radio he offers for free to make sure they're aired. And the resistance he's organized against KPFA and Pacifica management after they called the cops who brutalized and terrorized Nadra Foster inside the station is nothing short of revolutionary.

So we'll sign off with undying love for all who have supported the Bay View and add at the end the announcement of his next meeting on that critical issue. Be there!

Willie & Mary Ratcliff
SF Bay View
(415) 671-0789
SF Bayview Newspaper (soon to be reconstructed)

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Justice for Nadra Foster Community Planning Meeting
at the Black New World, 836 Pine St., West Oakland – Wednesday Sept. 24th at 6pm

by The Minister of Information JR

As a follow-up to the community town-hall meeting that was held last Sunday, Sept. 7, where a number of broadcasters, leaders in the Black community, and other people associated with Nadra Foster and KPFA converged on the Black New World (836 Pine) in West Oakland to assess the community's feelings about the KPFA/Pacifica management initiated police beat down of Black KPFA programmer Nadra Foster on Aug. 20 inside KPFA, the POCC Block Report Radio's Minister of Information JR will be hosting a community planning solution-oriented meeting to address the coming fall fund drive at KPFA, the need for a daily or weekly Black public affairs show on KPFA, as well as the new police state measures euphemistically called security measures that the management is trying to implement, this month, at the radio station supposedly in response to the police beat-down of Nadra Foster.

We invite everybody who is sincerely concerned about what has been/is happening at KPFA. Many including myself believe that the time for talking to management is over, and now it is time for us to take measures to remove this cancerous, pro-police regime from being the managers of this "community station." Everybody that could stand with that, we hope to see you at the Black New World, 836 Pine St. in West Oakland, on Wednesday, Sept. 24, at 6 p.m. For more information on the case of Nadra Foster, you could go to Block Report Radio - Home to watch a short video, hear audio interviews or read personal statements of people denouncing the KPFA/Pacifica initiated police attack on this Black programmer.

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The Minister of Information JR
POCC Block Report Radio
Block Report Radio - Home