Dear Dennis Herrera, City Attorney
We are writing to ask for your help, guidance and action. Supervisor Hillary Ronen plans to put a 40-tent ‘Safe Sleeping Area’ for the homeless in the parking lot of 1515 South Van Ness Avenue. I am asking you to stop the planned ‘Safe Sleeping Area’ until there is an independent study on the impact of such a site to our neighborhood and requires studies in such circumstances. For years, Hillary Ronen and the city of San Francisco have neglected this block and surrounding residential and business areas, and when it serves their purpose, uses it to warehouse the causalities of their failed homeless policies.
The 1515 South Van Ness property has been a site of contention since December 2015 when the Lennar development agency planned a 157-unit apartment building there. Supervisors Campos and then, Supervisor Ronen, at the persistence of special interest groups, made so many unreasonable demands that the developers walked away from the project. Ground floor retail space would have promoted local businesses and street activity. The project’s affordable/ low-income units would have been over the legal requirement. Had the project been approved, the development would have taken roughly two years to build, with a completion date in 2017. The site is a few blocks from the 24th Street BART Station and major bus lines and the project would not have displaced any residents. In fact, it would have provided much-needed residential space.
Instead of a thriving residential and business development, for ten months in 2016, the abandoned property became an enormous homeless encampment that wrapped around a half city block. Hillary Ronen did nothing to cleanup this encampment despite the neighbors’ protests. In 2017, Ronen negotiated with Lennar to put in a Navigation Center (sometimes hereafter referred to as “NC”) on the property that opened in June and was slated for 9 months, but ran three months beyond the closing date. The 120-bed NC cycled homeless through premises every 30 days meaning countless people with severe issues were brought into our community. In addition to the NC, Ronen negotiated a $1 million payment to a “cultural stabilization fund” run by Erick Arguello of the Calle24 Council putting more financial stress on the developer. Meanwhile, construction costs kept rising and the developer finally sold the property in 2019 to the City of San Francisco (who proceeded to further neglected the property). For years, the City and Hillary Ronen disproportionally made worse the very population they purport to care about. Instead of contributing stability and vibrancy to this area, they contributed to its decline. At the beginning of this year, homeless people moved back on the block sending us right back to where we were with the 2016 homeless encampment problem.
Our neighborhood has two solid blocks of low-income housing, Bernal Dwellings, between Folsom Street and Harrison Street, and 26th Street and Cesar Chavez. Last year, the city built a nine-story 95-unit tower (four stories above the legal height limit) for senior low-income housing directly next door to the blighted property at 1515 South Van Ness. These are low-income seniors who will be put at risk by the exposure to a large homeless population. After the COVIT-19 lockdown, Mayor Breed and Hillary Ronen actively encouraged the homeless to squat on our public sidewalk by drawing rectangles abutting our public parks and instructing people to set up their tents in them. We have written countless letters of protest to Supervisor Ronen over the years regarding continuing abuses to no avail.
This area of the Mission, with a high percentage of people of color and immigrants, is suffering from one of the highest rates of COVID-19 in San Francisco. The few blocks between South Van Ness, 23rd St., Harrison Street, and Cesar Chavez were the focus of a UC San Francisco infectious disease research project that tested nearly 3,000 people who live or work in this specific census tract for active COVID-19 infections. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that researchers chose to focus their study on the Mission because of its high population density, overcrowding, and large Latino population. The racial disparities seen in coronavirus cases across San Francisco were amplified in the Mission. Of those who tested positive in the study, 95% were Latino — despite Latinos making up just 44% of total participants. The Cities homeless policies take advantage of this vulnerable population by having encouraged tent encampments and using this property as a Navigation Center. Supervisor Ronen continues to threaten the health and stability of this community with a ‘Safe Sleeping Area.’
The Mission is not homogeneous and the 26th corridor between Valencia and Harrison is underdeveloped and could have benefited from the reinvigoration the Lennar project would have brought. This site deserves better than the years of either neglect or having homeless people brought on to it. My neighbors and I want the ‘Safe Sleeping Area’ blocked until there is an independent assessment of the impact of adding 40 homeless tents and as many as 60 homeless people into an already over-crowded and suffering community. Surely, in a city with such substantial economic resources as San Francisco, there are ways to accommodate the homeless and to benefit our immigrant and minority neighbors, without contributing to the decline of a potentially vibrant business and residential community which has been our home for decades. We all deserve better.
Sincerely,
Francesca Pastine
The sidewalk at 26th and Shotwell Street close to an encampment.
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