Dear Hillary,
In February of this year there was a burgeoning homeless community on Shotwell Street between 26th and Cesar Chavez that abuts the 1515 South Van Ness city owned property. After months of letter writing concerning this encampment, the tents were finally removed a couple weeks ago. I felt tremendous relief that, perhaps, my neighborhood can once again be livable and that I made headway in convincing you, Supervisor Ronen, to finally have some concern for the well-being and mental health of my community. I mistakenly thought that perhaps you finally decided that we, your constituents that live around this blighted block, should have their lives, if not drastically improved, at least be free of the problems that the homeless bring. Without the oppressive feeling that the encroaching encampments brought, I felt like I could dream of what could be. Looking out my window the other day I was thinking that I would try to organize a tree planting around the 1515 South Van Ness property to make it look less blighted. I was even considering renewing my request that you and the board of supervisors start an education campaign to keep the Mission clean, particularly the 26th corridor, which gets particularly trashy. Tragically, you do not see our neighborhood as a place that deserves trees or clean streets. In fact, I doubt you rarely even think of it at all (which is reflected in years of filthy streets and rampant homelessness) unless it fits into your agenda of encouraging tent encampments, creating homeless shelters, or catering to the anti-building demands of Calle 24.
The 1515 South Van Ness property (which is cater-corner to my house) has been a site of contention since 2014 when the Lennar development agency planned a 157-unit apartment building there. This development would have had ground floor below market rate artesian studios and 25% percentage of low income/affordable housing. You and Campos with the support of San Francisco supervisors cynically blocked Lennar’s efforts to break ground on this building. Finally, after you demanded a million dollars from Lennar to give to head of a Latinx Cultural organization, the developer cut their losses and put the property for sale.
In March of 2016, reporter J.K. Dineen from the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “In addition to the $1 million payment to a “cultural stabilization fund” run by Erick Arguello of the Calle24 Council, the former McMillan Electric building on the corner of 26th Street and South Van Ness will also be converted into a temporary homeless shelter until construction begins.” (Really Hillary?? A million dollar to a pet fund of Erick Arguello? This borders on extortion.) The temporary Navigation Center opened in June of 2017 and was supposed to be removed at the end of the year but was further delayed at a tremendous loss to the developer.
Construction never began.
Because you and Campos blocked and drained funds from this project for eight years, I have had to live cater-corner to a ½ city block with a vacant and dilapidated warehouse/parking lot. For ten months in 2016 it became an enormous homeless encampment that wrapped around the whole of this property. When the Navigation Center went in, my neighbors and I negotiated that only the homeless from the Mission be eligible (although I don’t think you kept to that promise), that the huge tent encampment on that block be serviced there first, and that there be a surrounding no-tent zone. Apparently, according to Mission Local, at the first Mission NC, homeless kept their tents in the area and used the NC as a watering hole. We did not want this trend to continue at 1515 South Van Ness. This center, again, sorely compromised the community, bringing into our neighborhood 120 homeless people, many of whom had mental and addiction issues. I would like to note that there were 120 beds but the homeless were cycled through every 30 or 60 days meaning countless people with severe issues were brought into our community. I had to become very politically active to make sure that the Navigation Center was run in a way to minimize negative effects on the neighborhood. This personally took time away from my business and a severe stress on my mental health. No matter how well the Navigation Center was managed, it was still a disruptive influence in the neighborhood. The sidewalk planter in front of the B&W repair shop and directly across from my house became a favorite hangout of people to inject drugs and smoke crack. A lot of mentally compromised people roamed the neighborhood making threatening gestures, running around naked or half dressed, acting out in the streets, and generally being a disruptive presence. A Hispanic family who created an amazing fresh Mexican Seafood restaurant on 26th and South Van Ness, Rincon Nayarit, endured ten months of the homeless encampment and then over a year of the Navigation Center. I felt horrible for the restaurant owner and his family because they invested so much into their restaurant to make it really nice with wonderful décor and super fresh food. However, because their large plate-glass windows faced the homeless encampment, and then the entrance of the Navigation Center where often residents were acting out their addictions or mental problems, they had a hard time attracting business and ultimately folded.
The Navigation Center was extended months beyond their move out date drawing out the pain of the neighborhood’s residents and businesses. Finally, the Lennar developers gave up building on the site. The city then bought the property in June of 2019 and promptly let it turn into a neglected blighted area with trash and human feces strewn sidewalks and where groups of men congregated (and still do) to get drunk. So, instead of having a building with people who are investing their efforts and resources into my neighborhood, I have had to live with, for the past eight years, a large blighted block, homeless encampments, and homeless shelters. The vacant city block also attracts crime such as gang shootings and car theft. The one good thing is that the hard-core drug users and severely mentally ill who lived in the huge homeless encampment in 2016 and who were then brought into the subsequent Navigation Center in 2017 no longer wandered the streets, although I expect that to change with the 'Safe Sleeping Area.'
The Mission is suffering from overcrowding, one of the highest rates of Covit 19 in San Francisco, and, with a high percentage of people of color and immigrants, is already one of the densest neighborhoods in San Francisco. Our neighborhood also has two solid blocks of low-income housing on 26th Street. You pushed to get built a nine-story tower (four stories above the legal height limit here) for senior low income housing right next door to this blighted area. After the Covit 19 lockdown, Mayor Breed and you actively encouraged the homeless to take over our public sidewalks. Unconscionably, you never studied the socio-economic impact of either the Senior building or the Navigation Center to our already marginalized neighborhood.
The zip code that you live in has been proven to influence your health. The stress of living in the middle of what can only be called city-government generated urban blight has taken a toll on my health and my income. The filth, slum conditions, and the shelters add an additional burden on an already marginalized community. I hold you and Campos responsible for this ongoing fiasco that never seems to cease and has created horrible conditions in this area for eight years. It's easy to theorize about how to govern, but what you don't realize is that your decisions have real-life consequences for people and your mismanagement and neglect of this site has been an enormous hardship to the constituents who live in this area.
You call yourself progressive but you take advantage of marginalized neighborhoods like the Mission. You allow our public sidewalks to be taken over by encampments, you put the broken people from your failed policies into homeless shelters on our block, you turn a blind eye to slum lords, and you allow trash to accumulate on our streets.
If I were to be kind, I would categorize your mismanagement of the my neighborhood as neglect, and it is true that you do neglect this area when it does not serve your purposes, but even worse than neglect, you are willfully using our community to warehouse San Francisco’s most desperately compromised people because we don’t have the power or financial clout to stop you. It is far easier, I am sure, to not care about the proliferation of tents in our community because you don’t get the pushback of more affluent neighboring communities such as Noe Valley, Potrero Hill, or Bernal Heights. It is far easier to use our block for a Navigation Center than said neighborhoods. It is far easier to use our block for a ‘Safe Sleeping Area’ than your own Portola neighborhood. But most egregiously, by stopping the development of housing on this site, you are directly responsible for this blighted block because you put your ideology over the interest of the people. Ours is a neighborhood of less affluent San Franciscans, people of color, and immigrants, and so we can be used with little or no political sacrifice to you. In fact, we have been exploited for years by your neglect, mismanagement, and opportunism. Using the 1515 South Van Ness Avenue property to, yet again, bring in homeless from all over the city into our neighborhood, is one more notch in your deplorable record.
The people in my community deserve better. You ask much of us but give nothing in return but empty symbolic nods to it being a Latinx community. Has your neighborhood in Portola had its sidewalks used for housing the homeless? Has your neighborhood hosted a Navigation Center. Is it going to host a safe sleeping area? Of course not. You destroyed the prospects of permanent and stable housing on this block and then you either neglect it or use it to solve the wreckage of San Francisco’s failed policies. If this is what you call good governance, you should take a good look at what you are burdening your under-privileged constituents with and, if that is ok with you, there is something profoundly not ok with your so called “progressive politics.”
Sincerely,
Francesca Pastine
PS: It is already a done deal that you are going to use the 1515 South Van Ness site as a ‘Safe Sleeping Area.’ That’s why you removed the encampment on Shotwell Street, not because I wrote countless letters asking for its removal, because you had an agenda for the abandoned site and the tents were in the way of that. I assume the encampment would still be on Shotwell Street, otherwise. And here I thought my tiny little voice, and the voice of others that do not want slum conditions on their street, was heard. Now you’re going to set up a phony community meeting that will pit different factions against each other, the same shit-show you pulled when you decided to turn the building into a Navigation Center. But you have already decided on it with no community input so it’s just a useless dog and pony show designed to make you look good and waste everyone else’s time. Again, it’s all about you and not about your constituents. You really disappoint.
Tens and car encampments quickly returned to the area. Ronen did nothing. Above: Car encampment on shotwell and 26th after Safe Sleeping Site was installed.
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