By Richard Ivanhoe, HANC President

Our July HANC meeting began with an update from District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood.  The budget process has been completed.  $400 million is being put into reserves.  About 1,000 vacant City positions have been cut.  With negotiations, 150 filled positions that were to be cut was reduced to about 40 positions that were cut.  More money was sent to the City Attorney’s office to help defend against the Trump administration.  Additional funding was also sent to the Public Defender’s office to hire more immigration attorneys.  Food access at Booker T. Washington was restored.  Not all advocacy was successful—many other program cuts were not restored and will need to find alternate sources of funding.  There are plans for both a regional and a local ballot measure to help fund MUNI, but the details have not yet been worked out.  Supervisors Chen and Melgar are working on legislation to protect residents and businesses from displacement due to upzoning.  Rezoning should go to a vote some time after the August recess.  There was a concern that the rezoning legislation will allow residences above the first floor in Neighborhood Commercial Districts (including the Haight Ashbury) to be converted to commercial uses, which is currently prohibited.

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By Christin Evans, HANC Board

As I write this, the final city budget has not yet passed through the Board of Supervisors, but the late night marathon of budget trades between the Mayor and Supervisors has concluded and next year's budget is largely settled. The budget has some good, bad and ugly in it.  Activists from the people’s budget coalition including labor unions fought hard and late into the night with mixed results.

Winners included the police department, the district attorney and sheriff's office including money for new jail beds.  Unions were able to stop some of the Mayor's proposed layoffs.

New treatment and shelter beds also were funded — however nowhere close to the 1500 beds promised by candidate Lurie on last year’s campaign trail.  Of note, 120 RESTORE beds for homeless individuals struggling with opioid use received funding.  The RESTORE beds are jointly managed by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) and the Department of Public Health (DPH) and expand a pilot program that was started under the Breed administration at a former shelter-in-place hotel in the Tenderloin.

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By Richard Ivanhoe, HANC President

SFMTA’s latest service changes for Muni went into effect on June 21.  For the Haight-Ashbury, the biggest change is to the former 6 Haight / Parnassus and 21 Hayes lines, which have been combined into the new 6 Hayes line.  Heading downtown, the route is the same as the previous 6 from 14^th Avenue and Quintara to Haight and Masonic, but instead of turning right onto Haight Street, the bus continues on Masonic to Hayes, where it turns right, and then follows the route of the former 21 bus to Hyde and Grove.  If you pick up this route at Haight and Masonic, the stop is on Masonic (the same stop as the 43), and not on Haight Street (where the 7 stops).  This new 6 route no longer goes down Market Street at all.  The return trip runs from Hyde and Grove to Masonic, then runs up Masonic to Frederick, where it continues along the previous route of the 6.  There will no longer be bus service on Hayes Street west of Masonic.  As partial compensation, the hours of the 7 bus have been extended, and it now runs from 5 am to midnight.

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By Alice Mosley, HANC Board

Committee room 250 was crowded with standing room only. The Land Use committee met to hear (or at least allow) public comment on its “upzoning” legislation, before it had been written. Although there was no legislation, there was a map that showed that the upzoning would greatly increase building heights along corridors throughout San Francisco, including the Haight Street commercial corridor, as well as affect half of the city. The ostensible justification for the “up zoning” was to meet state requirements for the construction of 82,000 new units in San Francisco.

During public comment - over 100 SF residents contributed--the very stipulation that there is a need for that quantity of new housing was challenged. Many outstanding contributions were made during this period of the hearing, and focused on many issues not yet addressed by the Board of Supervisors:

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By David Woo, HANC Board

HANC’s June meeting focused on this year’s budget fight. We were joined by Tim Redmond with 48Hills and Anya Worley-Ziegmann with the People’s Budget Coalition. The discussion revolved around this year’s nearly $800 million budget deficit, and the priorities of San Francisco communities versus those of Mayor Daniel Lurie and City Hall.

Tim discussed some of the realities of the budget, how even though San Francisco has a $13 billion budget the Board of Supervisors really only has control over a fraction of that money (and much of that fraction is dedicated to the police). He showed (with info from the People’s Budget Coalition) how in this budget cycle, many of the services that the Mayor is proposing to cut serve everyday people. He also demonstrated that the amount of money that millionaires in San Francisco are saving from the Trump tax cuts is the same amount as our deficit.

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By Calvin Welch, HANC Board and Kezar Advisory Committee Member

On May 15^th the Recreation and Parks Commission voted unanimously to grant an unprecedented 30 year lease and certain user approval rights to a new, and as yet unformed, professional soccer team, the Golden City Football Club.  A co-owner of the club, Geoff Oltmans,  and the private equity  company for which he works, Silver Lake, have been “ a longtime and generous donor to Tipping Point, the nonprofit Lurie founded in 2005” according to a report published by the on-line blog The SF Standard.  The Standard published the report one day after the Commission’s vote.  The report went on to claim that the two contributors jointly donated between $427,000 and $875,000 to Lurie’s foundation since 2012.  Mayor Lurie made no mention of the connection in his public endorsement of the deal.

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By Richard Ivanhoe, HANC President

After focusing on the San Francisco Budget, Rezoning, and Muni Service Cuts in our last three meetings, we decided to go a little lighter for our first meeting of the summer.  Our topic will be Counterculture.  A dictionary definition of counterculture is “a culture with values and mores that run counter to those of mainstream society.”  For many, “counterculture” means the movements of the 1960s and 1970s in which the Haight-Ashbury played a major role.

Last summer, the San Francisco Planning Department adopted the “Citywide Historic Context Statement for Counterculture (1965-1975).”  The last weekend of May this year, the Counterculture Museum opened at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, in the former RVCA space.  Its website announces “Our mission is to promote a deeper understanding of countercultural movements—from the Beat Generation, hippies, the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, LGBTQ+ rights, and beyond.”  Diagonally across the street, is the Doolan-Larson House and Storefronts.  San Francisco Heritage, who now owns the building, “is inviting teams to propose a public-serving cultural use for this ensemble of buildings.” HANC has also had a prominent role in counterculture, including the freeway revolt, the 409 House, and the recycling center.

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By Calvin Welch, HANC Board and Kezar Advisory Committee member

On May 15th the Recreation and Parks Commission voted unanimously to grant an unprecedented  30 year use permit (15 year and 3 five year extensions) to  Golden City Soccer Club, a privately held, for-profit  professional soccer team.  The agreement allows the team, not the Commission or staff, with no public hearing or review, to determine  if any other adult soccer team can use the facility.  Both the terms and the length of the agreement are unprecedented.

Kezar Stadium was rebuilt after the 1987 passage of  Proposition D, an $18 million general obligation bond.  The Voter  Handbook official argument urging the passage of the bond stated " Proposition D will provide for the revitalization  of Kezar Stadium and adjacent park areas to better meet the recreational needs of community groups and local high schools and sports leagues".  The open recreational use and  high school sports  focus of the stadium was  restated once the new Kezar was built in 1991 by a  Rec and Park Commission Resolution drafted, in large part, by community groups from the surrounding neighborhoods. .  Resolution 16191 states "informal community access to the stadium will be a priority use of the new Kezar Stadium... Structured community use is expected be occur less frequently than school use and informal community access...public and private schools will continue to be the primary user group at Kezar Stadium". While community based  non-profit soccer leagues are specifically mentioned in the Resolution there is no reference to professional, for-profit soccer leagues or games prioritized in the Resolution. The Resolution created a Kezar Stadium Advisory Committee (KAC)  to oversee the policies articulated in the Resolution in some specific detail.

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