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City Can't Figure Out What To Do With McCoppin Plaza And So Just Closes It Indefinitely

— By Jack Morse (@jmorse_) |

If at first you don’t succeed, try and try… oh whatever, who fucking cares. After struggling for several years to keep the homeless out of McCoppin Hub Plaza, Hoodline reports that the city has finally given up and just shut the thing down. Indefinitely.

According to John Updike, who heads the city’s Real Estate Division and in that capacity is in charge of the public space at Valencia and McCoppin Street, the plaza is now considered a construction zone and is off-limits to the public—as the chain-link fence that surrounds the park makes clear.

The chain-link fence is reportedly a placeholder until a permanent fence can be installed at a later date.

The city initially had high hopes for the mini-park, and rolled out the welcome mat for food trucks. The trucks never came, however, and homeless people began congregating there instead. But not to worry, Updike assured Hoodline that the indefinite closure is not at all about keeping out the homeless. Rather, it’s about public safety.

“There was a lot of abuse of the site and intimidation by people that frankly were doing illegal activities,” he told the publication. “There’s a lot of illegal activity that was occurring and it was to the detriment of the neighborhood being able to enjoy the rest of the open space.”

And while some may view the closure as a massive failure on the part of officials to utilize public land in a city where space is at a premium, perhaps this can be seen as a bold new crime-fighting strategy. Simply fence off areas where unsavory characters congregate and voilà, crime will disappear. 

Now all we need is enough chain-link fencing to enclose 49 square miles, and we’ll be good to go.

[Rendering of an imagined fence from 2015: San Francisco Public Works via Mission Local]

Previously on Uptown Almanac: 
Welp

The Giants Won, So Let's Throw Bottles at the Police Chief

— By Jack Morse (@jmorse_) |

The Giants won last night (go Giants!), and so the Mission did its customary thing. Last night, however, that thing included throwing bottles at Chief of Police Greg Suhr. A tipster, who recorded the incident on video (stills of which were turned into the above GIF) describes what he saw:

The chief arrived in an unmarked car.

A few minutes prior to his arrival, police on motorcycles were trying to clear the intersection of 24th & South Van Ness, when one officer was shoved off his motorcycle and people in the crowd threw several bottles.

The tipster goes on the specify that the footage is “of SFPD Chief Greg Suhr dodging a glass bottle that was thrown at him at 24th Street, near South Van Ness.”