by Randy Shaw on January 6, 2025 (BeyondChron.org)
Marina-Cow Hollow Public Meeting (Photo by Mike Ege)
A Tale of Two San Francisco’s
San Francisco claims to promote community engagement. But here’s what happened when City Hall recently asked three neighborhoods for feedback on a policy.
In the Marina and Cow Hollow, a public meeting was scheduled on December 3 to get feedback on SFMTA’s plan to raise free visitor parking with paid fees in both neighborhoods. The plan “drew “significant opposition from residents and merchants concerned about increased costs and potential impacts on local businesses.” In response, the city abandoned the proposal.
Contrast this with how City Hall approaches “community engagement” in the Tenderloin. The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) used its powers during COVID to convert four tourist hotels to homeless shelters in the neighborhood without a single public meeting. HSH then scheduled a zoom meeting on November 16 to discuss its plans to extend leases for some of these converted hotels for an additional decade
Tenderloin residents and businesses were not provided an in-person meeting. Those apparently are limited to affluent neighborhoods. In-person meetings offer far more fertile soil for resistance, as attendees can go back and forth with city officials in a way that cannot easily happen via zoom.
That’s why City Hall does not use them in the Tenderloin. It does not want to allow a mass public outpouring against their plans as occurred in the Marina and Cow Hollow with the parking fee plan.
Many who joined the zoom meeting urged HSH to do an economic impact analysis of the conversion of tourist hotels to shelters. Just as was requested in Cow Hollow and the Marina, where City Hall heard from “residents and merchants concerned about increased costs and potential impacts on local businesses.”
But different rules apply in the Tenderloin. The outgoing City Hall only honored economic impact concerns in affluent neighborhoods. HSH outright refused to conduct an economic impact analysis on extending the longterm conversion of tourist hotels to shelters. Nor would it agree to condition the lease extensions on the results of the study.
City Hall’s blatant discrimination against Tenderloin residents and businesses could not be clearer. HSH has aggressively moved to expand a tourist to shelter conversion program that has already done more damage to the Tenderloin and Lower Polk than the parking fee in the Marina and Cow Hollow would likely ever do to those neighborhoods.
An agency designed to serve the poor instead treats the city’s largest low-income neighborhood with contempt. This is the one-sided notion of “community engagement” incoming Mayor Daniel Lurie inherits this week.
Mayor Lurie Must End This Double Standard
Mayor Breed’s City Hall routinely ignored input from Tenderloin residents and businesses. For example, City Hall purchased the largest grocery store in the Tenderloin with plans to convert it to an illegal safe injection site—-and held no public meetings about the economic impact of their plans (or about any of the potential negative impacts). The site at 822 Geary was a Solo Foods before becoming a Goodwill; a critical retail resource for the Tenderloin and lower Nob Hill that City Hall stole from the neighborhood without a second thought.
After years sitting vacant as a public eyesore, 822 Geary Street will now become a medical facility for those with acute behavioral problems. Anyone think this type of operation would have opened in the Marina or Cow Hollow without a public meeting? And before the purchase deal was struck?
822 Geary is located in a zoning district that bans commercial uses above the second floor. Would any other similarly zoned residential neighborhoods have approved City Hall spending millions to convert a grocery store to a psychiatric health facility?
You know that would never happen in a gentrified or affluent neighborhood.
I was recently quoted in the SF Chronicle describing Mayor Breed’s record in the Tenderloin as a “disaster.” 822 Geary is one reason why.
Mayor Lurie must end this official hypocrisy around which only some neighborhoods get their input valued. “Progressive” San Francisco should stop discriminating against its few remaining low-income neighborhoods. City officials talk about “geographic equity” but refuse to implement it.
Tenderloin property and business owners pay the same taxes as in other neighborhoods. But they get taxation without representation when their input is not as respected as is the case in wealthier communities.
The Tenderloin and Lower Polk’s strong opposition to the four tourist hotels converted to shelters should end these plans (three remain pending). It should have the same impact as the objections waged by Marina and Cow Hollow stakeholders to plans to raise parking fees.
Mayor Lurie should demand true community engagement for all neighborhoods. The Tenderloin deserves no less.
Randy Shaw
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s latest book is Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. He is the author of four prior books on activism, including The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. He is also the author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco
