Dear Dennis Herrera, City Attorney, et. al.
In June of this year, many tents started to proliferate around the 1515 South Van Ness property on Shotwell at 26th Street. I had asked Paul Monge to have them moved since I didn't want a repeat of what happened in 2016 when a huge tent encampment surrounded this property. Paul Monge wrote to me on July 1:
"Francesca, the Emergency Operations Center is currently looking at city owned properties that could be temporarily activated to help relocate individuals whose tents are set up on public walkways and in front of other resident's homes. One thought that was proposed was opening up the outdoor parking space at 1515 South Van Ness to move the tents around the property and within the immediate vicinity within the bounds of the property (similar to what was done in 2016 but at a much smaller scale). I wanted to get your thoughts on that proposed measure."
I asked my neighbors what they thought of this proposal and got a resounding no. Their instincts were correct. Mr. Monge promises, in his email, that tents would be inside the property, not outside. He refers to 2016 but what he means is 2017 when Supervisor Hillary Ronen persuaded Lennar (who owned the property and was in the process of getting city approval for a 157 unit housing project there) to use the property as a Navigation Center since construction was constantly delayed because of San Francisco's bad-faith manipulations. At that time, the Inner Mission Neighborhood negotiated with Supervisor Ronen to have a tent-free zone around the vicinity, among other demands. This was particularly important because, after reading about the first Navigation Center at 1950 Mission Street, it was clear that the homeless put up their tents around the NC only using it as a 'watering hole' and for services. At the time, good friends of mine lived on Stevenson Street and I saw first hand how the neighborhood deteriorated when the Navigation Center was installed. In fact, my friend's block got so bad that, even though they lived there for over twenty years and wanted to stay in San Francisco, they were forced to sell their property and move to the suburbs.
Laura Wenus interviewed a resident from the 1950 Mission Street Navigation Center in the Mission Local on December 8, 2016. Wenus quotes him as saying: “I don’t sleep here…I have stuff out there,” he said. “I’ve been on the streets for eight years, it’s hard to break the cycle. This is what I do. A lot of folks there were placed there but they were still in the encampments. Either their partner didn’t get in or [they did and] there was some kind of rule violation,” he said. Or, “People had excess of stuff so they have storage…They had a lot of stuff they had accumulated over years of being on the streets.”
The articles goes on to say: Though allowing possessions is one of the navigation center’s distinguishing characteristics, Glass said it’s not always possible for the center to store everything a resident may come in with...Randy Quezada, a spokesperson for the Department of Homelessness, said while the shelter does try to accommodate belongings and doesn’t have a specific limit to how much an individual can bring, some come in with hoarding disorders, or people may simply want more space. It can also be hard to adjust to a new lifestyle, he said. “To the extent that you may have some people who will slip out and go back to the tents at night, that happens, and that’s part of the engagement process.” Quezada said. “For some people … that have been living on the streets a long time, it’s hard to re-acclimate to being indoors.”
For the people in my community, it was critical that the 1515 South Van Ness Navigation Center not make our dense, immigrant, POC, and predominantly low-income neighborhood worse. We pressured Supervisor Ronen to agree to a tent-free zone and other provisions. Still, there were residents in the South Van Ness Navigation Center that brought a lot of drug use and unstable behavior to our community. Fast forward to December 2020 and Mr. Monge, as I said above, intimates that tents will be in the parking lot area, not outside of it. Paul Monge and Supervisor Hillary Ronen are representative of the type of city behavior that demonstrates an absolute lack of concern for the people who are negatively impacted by their agenda.
We now have a particularly huge vehicle encampment taking over the whole sidewalk between Virgil Alley and South Van Ness Avenue (this vehicle has appropriated huge parts of our sidewalk way beyond its perimeters. San Francisco pandemic parking rules state that "Parking enforcement [be] suspended for the following: 72-hour overtime parking limit and towing, except for towing in Temporary Emergency Transit Lanes." This exemption does not say that people in cars parked permanently during this time can also take over huge swaths of public sidewalks. Included in that encampment are a lot of bicycle parts and other belongings that clearly belong to the residents of the Safe Sleeping site. We have supermarket carts full of stuff that belong to residents at the Safe Sleeping area on Shotwell Street between Cesar Chavez and 26th Street. We have a burgeoning tent community on 26th Street and Shotwell, also directly across the street from the Safe Sleeping site. A month ago, this encampment started with one tent and has now expanded to three. If the city would remove tents before they attract other tents and, therefore, establish large encampments, it would probably be easier to get those people help. Instead, they allow tents to languish and expand until the situation traumatizes our communities. This encampment is also particularly messy and their trash is often strewn all over the sidewalk and the street. The sidewalk there is very narrow and it is impossible to get around the encampment. In fact, I watched a mother with a small baby have to veer out into traffic to get around it. Horace Alley between 26th and 25th now has the beginnings of an encampment and it is being used as a latrine. During a SF SAFE meeting on December 8, we walked through the alley so that the SAFE consultant could recommend how to keep our garages and yards more secure. There were large piles of human feces everywhere, plus a lot more graffiti than I had ever seen there.
Clearly, Paul Monge was disingenuous when he told us that tents, etc. would be inside the 1515 South Van Ness Property not outside. As I have stated before, creating a no-tent zone that extended a few blocks lessened the impact of the 120 bed NC in 2017. The Navigation Center was only tolerable because our community studied the failures of the 1950 Mission Street Navigation Center and, therefore, organized and made demands that minimized its impact. As always, Supervisor Ronen was not interested in the impact of this NC on our neighborhood and hadn't we organized the narrative would have been very different.
I am including a picture of the proposed Lennar project for this site to give you a framework of how malignant bad-faith policy and mismanagement has deprived our neighborhood of this positive outcome in our community. Apparently, in the view of Supervisor Ronen and the city of San Francisco, our community does not deserve better than trash, encampments, and shelters. After much neglect and blight, San Francisco, yet again, forces the result of their failed homeless policy on our community, a policy that, after six years of not moving the needle of the unsheltered occupying our streets, is an absolute failure.
We did not want the Safe Sleeping Site here but now that Supervisor Ronen has forced it on us. The least the city can do is manage the surrounds in order to minimize the impact and suffering of our community. We have devoted much of our time and creative energy fighting to keep the streets of this small part of the Mission up to the standard that any normal, minimally well-run city would provide their constituents. As we have said over and over, Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who obviously cares nothing about living standards and only focuses on those things that fit into her ideological framework, has emphatically failed us. We are asking that the City of San Francisco begin working in the interest of their constituents and that Dennis Herrera, City Attorney, Supervisor, Norman Yee, President of the Board of Supervisors, step in to protect our vulnerable community.
Sincerely
Francesca Pastine
Squatters on 26th Between Virgil and South Van Ness bring two huge commercial storage units onto the sidewalk.
Across from Safe Sleeping Area. Not the stove, propane, huge storage units, chop shop operations. These people slept, drank, & used drugs in the doorways of this apartment building. The encampment persisted for almost a year.
Safe Sleeping Area residents use the sidewalk to store their stuff.
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