District 5 Supervisor London Breed was featured at the March HANC General Membership meeting. For many of the 70 people who attended it was their first chance to meet the Supervisor and ask her questions about important neighborhood and City wide concerns and issues. She was joined by former Supervisor Beven Dufty, who is now Director of the SF program HOPE (Housing Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement) which addresses solutions to homelessness in San Francisco.
The Supervisor began by sharing some of her background including the fact that she grew up in public housing in the Western Addition and emphasized that fixing the public housing problems in SF is a major issue on her agenda as Supervisor. So is working to connect young people with job and other opportunities to help them build successful lives. She believes the solutions to crime must include economic and social solutions along with a police component.
The questioning started off with queries as to her position on the Weiner/Farrel TIC condo conversion give away legislation that many in the audience and HANC oppose, seeing it as a major threat to the maintenance of affordable rental stock in the City. She refused to state her position one way or the other, maintaining that both sides of the debate were providing questionable "facts" and she was doing more research via the City's departments and reports to get the real information before making up her mind. When queried as to what her research had turned up she was unable to state any of the facts she had found so far.
The next major topic to be addressed was homelessness both in the Haight and as a larger social issue in San Francisco. She stated that the non-profits and agencies which the City funds to deal with the problem need to do a better job of getting services to the people who need it. She felt that people who break the law should be prosecuted but that a police solution alone was not the answer to homelessness and that sometimes the police can escalate a situation.
