Politics

Activists Respond to Sup. Wiener's Plan to Close All Parks at Night with Hot Dog BBQ, Slumber Party

Keeping up his steady track record of disappointing everyone who isn't a wealthy donor or dementia victim, Supervisor Scott Wiener has been pushing hard to close down all city parks between the hours of midnight and 5am.  The stated goal?  To combat vandalism and illegal trash disposal in the parks.  Or, as Wiener put it, “[to provide] us with one more tool for protecting our parks.”

While vandalism and trash dumping is already illegal (and certainly a problem), officials claim that without enforceable closure hours giving them reason to bust people merely for being in a public space at night, there's little they can do to enforce the laws already on the books.

Of course, folks like Mayor Lee have been promoting the legislation for Supervisor Wiener have been more blunt about it—Lee told the Examiner that he sees the law as a way to clear the homeless out of parks.

Activists/people with empathy didn't take that well. So the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club and an anonymous group of hot dog enthusiasts have organized two separate protests.

Harvey Milk is throwing a “sleep-in” at Dolores Park Monday night starting at 9pm that's gaining a lot of steam on Facebook.  Here's why:

San Francisco prides itself on being a place that is welcoming and open to all. Our parks remain one of the City’s greatest public treasures and are spaces of recreation, sport, entertainment, and leisure. This proposed legislation threatens the accessibility and openness of our parks and comes on the heels of a spate of recent policies at City Hall that have sought to regulate public spaces, to police bodies, and to criminalize homelessness. With almost 30% of San Francisco’s homeless population identifying as LGBT, and many living on our streets and in our parks, we know who the real targets of this legislation are. This is yet another attack on the homeless, on queer people, poor people, and people of color, and on our right to exist in public space in our society. The Harvey Milk Club has had enough. Parks are for people and we believe this policy to be another step in the wrong direction for San Francisco.

For those of you who don't do the cold (or, “what homeless people suffer through on a nightly basis”), you can also gobble up dick jokes and food poisoning Sunday night at the “Wiener Roast.”  Details and mission statements are more thin with that one, but they note “We have ketchup, mustard, pickle relish, and plates covered. Vegetarian wieners are being looked into.”

The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote of Wiener's park closure legislation Tuesday, October 29th.

Scott Wiener Seeks "Culture Shift" in Dolores Park Following Renovation

Scott Wiener, right, at Monday's “Breakfast and a Park Clean Up.”

During a Dolores Park community breakfast, Supervisor Scott Wiener announced that the oft-delayed Dolores Park Renovation project is slated to begin in January—only a few months past the previously announced date.  However, Wiener's comments about what will happen after the renovations are complete in 2015 were the most curious.

“Everything about this Park is going to be better,” Dolores Park Works quoted him saying. “But we need to make sure that when we reopen the Park we have a culture shift, and we need to get people to stop trashing it.  We want to make sure when it reopens, that this Park is going to continue to be really the gem of our park system.”

No doubt that the park gets trashed week after week—it's a shame and it would fantastic if it stopped. However, the tragedy of the commons is a very real thing and its rare to see any widely-used public space not get wrecked by its more apathetic users.  Park advocates like to claim that “leave no tracecampaigns will solve the Dolores Park litter 'crisis', but even if the all-responsible population Burning Man cannot help but leave leaps of garbage—that takes weeks to clean up—on the Playa, it seems impossible to imagine such a campaign would work in a city park.

Curious about how Wiener saw the cultural shift taking shape in the newly rehabilitated park, we reached out to him for more clarification on Twitter.

“[We] need a strong education campaign about treating the park with respect, accompanied with better enforcement.”

Better enforcement seems reasonable, at least on face.  In fact, in New York's Riverside Park, neighbors are making similar calls about their trash crisis, with one echoing Wiener's sentiment, telling the New York Times, “If this was their house, they would never do this. We need better enforcement.”

Of course, “better enforcement” isn't as practical as it might seem:

Despite such complaints, park officials say their options are limited. They have mostly pursued a strategy of flooding the area with maintenance workers early Monday morning. William Castro, the parks department’s Manhattan borough commissioner, said that despite the recent hiring of scores of new enforcement patrol officers, penalizing parkgoers was impractical. The officers, who carry clubs and mace, focus mainly on loud music and alcohol, which, he pointed out, were the source of even more complaints.

Littering regulations are difficult to enforce for a few reasons, especially when it comes to large groups of relatives and friends who remain in the park for hours. “For the officers, it’s time-consuming to observe, and then who are you going to give the summons to?” Mr. Castro said. “If you go into a large crowd and the person resists, arguments happen and things spin out of control.”

Then again, maybe “enforcement” will work just fine here.

London Breed Gives Up on Twitter, The Bike Vote, Having People Like Her

After a storied career as a caustic and crabby Twitter user and occasional District 5 Supervisor, London Breed shut down her unfettered Twitter account this afternoon amid accusations that she's unprofessional and generally thoughtless. Why?  London's straight-shooter and all-around dopey answer to a softball question about safe streets:

That's correct: a couple of human flat tires means all cyclists are undeserving of safe streets, or something like that.  Streetsblog breaks down the troubling sentiment:

The underlying assumption in this argument is that cycling is an activity for a distinct class of people, rather than just a way of getting around. According to this way of thinking, the city cannot implement proven redesigns that make streets safer for the general population until this “class” exhibits suitable behavior. Imagine if you applied the same logic to car infrastructure: No highway or garage would ever be built until we sorted out all the speeding, failure to yield, and distracted driving that kills thousands of Americans each year.

It seems London Breed decided she could no longer control her impulses—her judgment kaput—and she signed off for good.  And it's a shame, too.  We'll forever miss her implications that her constituents are pro-slavery, declarations of being SF's top party host, and general petulance.

[Screenshot by mikesonn]

Jack Spade Allowed to Move Forward With Mission Store

Wanting to capitalize on the recent influx of immaculate artisans on Valencia, Jack Spade has been pushing hard to move into the neighborhood—from getting a local bookstore kicked out of their 25-year-old home through rent increases, to aggressively demanding local businesses support their efforts, to even—as Zoning administrator Scott Sanchez told the Board of Appeals last week—misleading Sanchez in making his formula retail letter of determination, which allowed Jack Spade to initially move forward with their 16th Street expansion under false pretenses.

Given the situation, the Valencia Corridor Merchants Association was successfully able to get Jack Spade's construction permit suspended early last month.  But last night, the Board of Appeals fell one vote short of permanently overturning their building permit, allowing Jack Spade to resume construction.

Jack Spade co-leader Melissa Xides flew all the way in from New York to attend the meeting and praise Jack Spade as a community company and small business—distinguishing it from the billion-dollar enterprise which it is a subsidiary of. As quoted by Mission Local, she praised the neighborhood's gentrification and her business:

We are a neighborhood retailer through and through, there is nothing formulaic about our stores,” said Xides. “We fell in love with the uniqueness of 16th Street…We fell in love with the food scene and gentrification that’s happening there.”

Somewhat contradictorily, Jack Spade's supporter's main arguments is that 16th Street is a rotten shithole that only a multinational business can fix—Bell Jar's Sasha Wingate complained about graffiti and feces outside her shop; skateboard badass-cum-fashion designer Benny Gold spoke about his concern for his young daughter's safety on the block.

But the real gem came during last week's Board of Appeals meeting, when pro-Jack Spade neighbor came up to the Board and began showing pictures of graffiti along 16th Street. At one point, she highlighted a sticker on a parking meter reading “BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS” and stated that we needed to clean up the neighborhood, and Jack Spade would make it happen. How ironic, the very person who wants to remove a “BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS” sticker sided with the retailer who removed Adobe Books Books Books.

VCMA members admit that their only course of action left is to put pressure on Jack Spade's CEO and management to back out. But Jack Spade's employment page is filling up with positions for their future 16th Street store, those prospects seem dim.

SF Bike Share Racks Now Installed For Conservative Outrage

According to the transit wonks over at Streetsblog, work crews began installing the Bay Area Bike Share stations yesterday, ahead of next Thursday's five-city launch.  This is wonderful news for both commuters and news junkies: as we saw during NYC's roll-out of bike sharing this spring, commuters absolutely loved it and conservatives lost their collective shit (most famously, WSJ editorial board member/Crypt Keeper Dorothy Rabinowitz's rant about the program's totalitarianism).  Oh yes, by next week, we can expect to see delighted smiles on the face of riders and C.W. Nevius and his merry gang of blowhards foaming uncontrollably at the mouth.

Let's just hope these bike racks don't meet the same fate as Zeitgeist's

[via Streetsblog]

Photo Booth Truck Takes Over Valencia Art Wall

As a city that loves trucks and putting mustaches on things, the Inside Out 11M project took over the Valencia Art Wall earlier this morning, snapping photos of passersby and pasting them high up the wall.

Here's how Inside Out describes the campaign:

Beyond any political debate about 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., these portraits remind us that behind the numbers are real human stories. Inside Out 11M aims to represent the diversity and unity of people that can call America home.

The project takes part in Inside Out, a global participatory art project initiated by the award-winning artist JR to pay tribute to the power and dignity of individuals by displaying their portraits in public spaces around the world. People share their untold stories and transform messages of personal identity into works of public art.

According to Burrito Justice, the photographers have packed up and made their way to another location, so head over there now to get early dibs on the feast of mustache, devil horn, and googly eye drawing.

[via Burrito Justice]

Critical Mass is Dead, Says Print Publication

Have you heard of Critical Mass? No? Well, it was 21-year-old pro-bicycle protest ride frequented by clove cigarette-sucking intellectuals who continue to think Che Guevara tshirts are acceptable. Or something like that.

Anyway! The SF Weekly has published quite the story about the slow leak in Critical Mass' tires:

Sixteen years ago this month (and 101 years to the day after the 1896 demonstration), Critical Mass was important. Some 7,000 riders inundated San Francisco and were violently confronted by police. It was a watershed moment for cycling in this city; Critical Mass served as a catalyst in changing San Francisco. But, like all catalysts, Critical Mass itself didn't change, even as the landscape around it did, both literally and figuratively.

Instead, a movement created 21 years ago to shake this city out of its institutionalized torpor has, itself, become institutionalized. It has become yet another San Francisco experience, a ritualization of something once vital and meaningful in a city increasingly preoccupied with celebrating what it once was.

“I don't find it to be the same ride anymore,” says Joel Pomerantz, a Critical Mass co-founder. “The Haight has museums of counterculture — but it doesn't have any counterculture. Critical Mass doesn't have critical mass anymore. People go to see it the way you go to see the Exploratorium. It's more like an amusement park ride.”

Read on for insight into the abandonment of leftist ideals within the SF Bike Coalition, the passive-aggressive war of words (and ideals) from the SF Bike Party, and a bit of Critical Mass political history.

Supervisor Campos Issues Senator Yee's Statement on BART Strike

Because Uptown Almanac is An Esteemed Source of Political Journalism (or something), our inbox is flooded with a torrent of statements and press releases from various politicians and other such humanoids.  Most are forgettable, gutless platitudes that only a middling Democrat could possibly grind out.  However, yesterday's series of statements on the BART strike carried with them a distinct feeling of déjà vu.

Take Senator Leland Yee's statement, dumped out around noon yesterday:

“I stand with BART employees in their efforts for a fair contract. BART Management needs to understand the importance of worker safety and get back to the table and negotiate in good faith. A quick, fair resolution to this conflict is in everybody’s best interest.”

Then, a hair over four hours later, Supervisor Campos churned out a nearly identical quote—some segments ripped off in their entirety:

“I support the efforts of BART employees to secure a fair contract. BART Management needs to get back to the table and negotiate in good faith. BART management also needs to address the workers’ crucial safety concerns. A fast and fair resolution to this conflict is of the utmost importance to the entire Bay Area community. Riders need a dependable public transportation system and workers need a safe workplace.”

Is it plagarism? Lazy regurgitation of party talking points? A simple #oops?

Legalization of The Tamale Lady Underway!

The Tamale Lady's kitchen.

Within hours of news breaking that Zeitgeist kicked the Tamale Lady out of the bar, city officials and local non-profits scrambled to bring Virginia Ramos' beloved trash bag of tamales up to code.

While the cause of The Tamale Crackdown remain murky, the Department of Public Health remains at the root.  According to a report by Inside Scoop, the Department didn't explicitly demand Zeitgeist oust Virginia, but they see her as an “illegal vendor, plain and simple.”

However, during a recent health inspection of Zeitgeist, the inspector specifically brought up the Tamale Lady:

They said that we as the business are being held responsible for the quality of her products — and that means if they come inspect and find anything wrong with what she does, then they will hold us responsible,” [Zeitgeist general manager Mareike Pittman] says. “So if something is really wrong, they could close the kitchen, and if they do that, then we have to close down everything because we need a kitchen to sell alcohol.”

According to Nate Allbee, legislative aide to Mission Supervisor David Campos, the issue stems from Virginia's usage of a private, unregulated kitchen in her home.  As seen in the biopic rockumentary Our Lady Of Tamale, Virginia can be seen preparing her nightly haul in cramped quarters no different from any other rented apartment in town.

“There's an entire group—almost exclusively in the Mission—that includes the bacon-wrapped hot dogs on Mission Street and the Tamale Lady etc., that prepare their food in home kitchens and on the street, and that's totally illegal,” Allbee told us.  “We turn a blind eye to it because everyone loves them and no one is getting sick from their food.  But, we cannot work with the Department of Health to legalize and regulate them [because of their use of unregulated kitchens].”

Fortunately, Supervisor Campos is leading the charge to remedy this.  His office has already been in contact with La Cocina, a Mission-based non-profit incubator for immigrant food entrepreneurs, who are gearing up to get Virginia into a commercial kitchen.

“La Cocina is happy to host her and have wanted to work with her before.  They have an empty, licensed kitchen where she could make her tamales, allowing her to continue selling around the neighborhood.”

It remains to be seen if this development would be enough for the likes of Zeitgeist—and the Health Department breathing down their necks.  However, Allbee tells us that they believe they found a loophole in the city's regulation that classify tamales as wrapped, prepackaged food because of their corn husk, enabling them to be be sold with the same legality as packaged Cheetos.

(If you haven't watched Our Lady Of Tamale yet, do so:)

City Kicks Tamale Lady Out of Zeitgeist

First they came for the portapotties

UPDATE: SFist was able to get Virginia on the phone and find out more:

Virginia says she received a shock when she got the news from Zeitgeist yesterday that she couldn't sell tamales there, effective immediately, and was disappointed that Zeitgeist didn't try to work out a solution with her, such as letting her serve tamales from out of their kitchen. But she says what's make her sad is that even though she has many other spots where she sells her tamales, Zeitgeist is the spot where she feels the most community support. “This is one of the places I can see you guys all the time and talk to you guys and love you guys. Everyone comes in, there's a patio with everybody sharing everything. So that's one of the things that really upsets me about it.”

She's now afraid to sell tamales at other spots—fearing further punishment, and without a “safe business” of her own to operate out of, she's trying to figure out how to move forward (she suggestings people contact her on Twitter if they have any ideas).  As of right now, she's considering starting a start-up delivery business.

[Fuck everything]

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