“It will be on an alley that we pass through every day to go home,” said Amanda Li, whose family lives in an affordable housing complex across from the site. “It will definitely affect us.”

The dispensary will be on one of Bayview’s less developed streets, near low-income and senior housing. Over a dozen cannabis facilities already operate in the neighborhood, nearly all of which are used only to grow the plant. Many residents, especially Chinese Americans, have opposed the new facility, which will sell cannabis products, out of fear that it will encourage drug use and make the area less safe. Despite their objections, the city’s Planning Commission approved the project Thursday because it did not violate city laws.

[ Read also: “As Attacks on Asian Americans Regain Spotlight, SF Group Seeks to Soothe Community” ]

Construction of the 2,500-square-foot facility at 2330 Lane St. is projected to begin by the end of 2024, though the project has yet to obtain building permits. Doors could open to customers about a year later.

Mubasher Choudhery, a Bayview native and owner of the site and forthcoming dispensary, proposed the project as a participant in the San Francisco Office of Cannabis’ equity program. The program is designed to help groups disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs of the 1980s enter the cannabis industry.

Choudhery said his vision is for people to come to the store not only to buy cannabis products, but also to consume it and see how it is grown.

San Francisco and California have legalized the production and consumption of cannabis, but the federal government has not. Many first-generation Chinese Americans, especially seniors, still see it as similar to harsher drugs like opium, which the British exported to China during the period of its invasion.

“The stigma behind cannabis is what we’re fighting against,” said Choudhery, a third-generation immigrant of Southeast Asian descent.

More than 30 people attended the Thursday hearing that was triggered by an official request by Josephine Zhao, a community leader who previously ran for the city’s public school board, on behalf of residents who spoke limited English.

One-by-one, people took the microphone to express their concerns. They said they were troubled that teenagers were already smoking in the neighborhood’s streets and parking lots, and feared that the dispensary would entice more to try cannabis and become addicted to it. They said that people high on the drug could not control their behavior, which worried them in light of recent high-profile instances of anti-Asian violence.

“Many people here have a lot of concerns,” Zhao told the commission. “You may say that they are uneducated about marijuana, but that’s their life experience.”

The residents objected to yet another cannabis facility in an area that already had so many. As they had organized to oppose Choudhery’s project, they said, they found out about two other proposed facilities near their homes, both of which would only be for growing cannabis.

The Bayview is one of few areas in San Francisco where much of the land can host light industrial and manufacturing facilities, including those in the cannabis industry. The facilities are cheek-to-jowl with diverse, low-income communities.

“We expect this is going to be an issue moving forward,” said Dyanna Volek, who came to the hearing as a neighbor and member of the Bayview Hunters Point Citizen Advisory Committee, a volunteer group that advises city government on land-use and other neighborhood issues.

After they approved Choudhery’s project, the Planning Commission suggested that he remain in contact with the neighborhood advisory committee to field concerns they might have in the future.

The post Cannabis Dispensary and Lounge to Open in SF Bayview, Despite Residents’ Objections appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Dance company LionDanceME’s amplified-sound permit, with the board-imposed constraints, will expire in June. At that point, the company can apply for a new one. 

At the board’s Wednesday hearing, merchants and others said that the community had not been adequately informed about the company’s efforts to get this permit. That’s why they had not shown up and voiced their concerns at the public meeting where it was granted. 

“This time our community will for sure know it,” said Ben Marcus-Willers, referring to the possible future hearing for a renewed permit. He, alongside others from Chinatown’s merchant community, triggered Wednesday’s hearing. He said he believed the board’s decision was fair. 

Following the decision, Norman Lau, LionDanceME founder, said: “It’s not about winning a battle. It’s about avoiding a war.” 

For weeks, Lau and a group of local merchants have been in contention over the permit, as part of a larger, ongoing conflict over outdoor events in Chinatown.  

The events were originally intended to help the neighborhood recover from the ravages of COVID-19, which injured the tourism industry in Chinatown and throughout the city. But as local groups increasingly obtained permits for outdoor street closures to hold events, merchants along Grant Avenue, a major tourist corridor before the pandemic, began to object. They claimed that the events were creating too much noise and disrupting their businesses. 

The dispute came to a head when the merchants group got the Board of Appeals to intervene, temporarily suspending Lau’s amplified-sound permit. The two sides failed to reach a compromise ahead of the board hearing.  

The board voted 4-1 to let LionDanceME temporarily retain a more limited version of the permit.

The permit’s original terms allowed for amplified sound at events during Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., along a three-block span of Grant Avenue. The board’s decision limits the use of amplified sound to Saturdays, from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., along the 700 block of Grant Avenue, between Sacramento and Clay streets. 

LionDanceME possesses a separate permit, which is valid through March 2025 and allows it to hold outdoor events without amplified sound on weekends, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., along three blocks of Grant Avenue. The board’s decision did not affect this permit. However, Lau can choose to modify its terms, said Nick Chapman, the manager for street closures and special events at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. 

At the Wednesday hearing, Lau said he was open to reducing the scope of that permit too. 

The post In SF’s Chinatown, Conflict Over Outdoor Events Resolved — for Now  appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The dispute, which the city’s Board of Appeals is set to weigh in on Wednesday, is the latest skirmish over the purpose of Grant Avenue, once filled with throngs of daily visitors, and how it should serve the neighborhood’s commerce and culture.  

“We’re not a theme park,” said Ben Marcus-Willers, branding director for Red Blossom Tea Company and one of a handful of people opposing the potential expansion of outdoor events. Other closures of Grant Avenue for events have disrupted the flow of customers to the shop, he said. 

Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents the district and is running for mayor, is trying to help settle the dispute before the Wednesday hearing. 

[ Read also: “New Parade Dragon Carries on Local Legacy Dating Back Nearly 175 Years” ]

Since the start of the pandemic, Chinatown groups have closed pockets of the neighborhood to vehicle traffic, making space for events that might draw people. As the closures increased over time, local merchants began to bristle. Those frustrations boiled over this March in response to the latest attempt, by a dance company, to potentially expand events. A group of merchants had the Board of Appeals intervene, temporarily halting the expansion. The two sides then set up dueling online petitions, both trying to garner public support. 

By April 12, the merchants’ petition, on the website change.org, had 1,453 signatures. The competing petition had 1,626 signatures. 

Neighborhood mixed on outdoor performances

Chinatown’s denizens have mixed opinions about the recurring street closures and the events they enable.  

Norman Lau is a Chinatown native and the founder of LionDanceME, the dance company whose application for an amplified-sound permit sparked the current conflict over Grant Avenue. For years, Lau’s company has used the street for weekend lion dances, in which costumed performers mimic a lion’s movements.  

Lau said he believes that hosting dance practices and performances on the neighborhood’s busiest street has helped attract not only tourists, but also young people who had grown up there and later moved away.  

Members of younger generations seldom have a reason to return unless their families own shops, Lau observed. “We don’t really have anything to offer for people in their 20s and 30s,” he said. 

Some nearby merchants agree. They said the performances increase the area’s gravitational pull as a cultural hub for Chinese Americans.  

“Just last week, one of my customers drove two hours from Sacramento with his family to see the lion dance in Chinatown,” said Wendy Li, who has worked on Grant Avenue for over a decade. 

However, for Chinatown residents like 89-year-old cartoonist Xu Shu Lei, who lives in a small room on Grant Avenue with his wife, the constant drumming sound during performances can be frustrating. It often wakes him from his afternoon naps.  

“At this age, I don’t get a lot of sleep at night,” Lei said. 

“We all support lion dancing and youth engagement,” said David Au, one of the local merchants who triggered the Board of Appeals’ intervention. But Au said he would like to see at least some of those dance practices and events occur elsewhere in Chinatown, outside of Grant Avenue. He also suggested that local groups could offer other forms of youth engagement, like more after-school programs at the Chinatown YMCA. 

Cherry Cai, who runs a gift store on the street, echoed that idea. She said the lion dance performance benefited her business and suggested that it could be rotated among different locations. 

Uptick in events irks some

Outdoor events in Chinatown began ramping up soon after COVID-19 struck a blow to tourism in San Francisco. Neighborhood groups obtained permits through the city’s Shared Spaces program to close a section of Grant Avenue to car traffic on weekends. The site became home to cultural performances and outdoor businesses that drew pedestrians. 

The weekend closures were extended after COVID restrictions lifted. Over time, additional groups got permits to close the street for events.  

Some local merchants and residents began objecting to closures. They said that some event organizers were not consulting the community enough before getting permits for events, which were reducing parking for residents, customers and vehicles unloading merchandise, and resulting in more unsightly trash on the streets. The merchants were concerned that increasing closures would further hurt their businesses.  

“Eventually, all these permits are merging together,” Marcus-Willers said. “At a certain point, we are going to lose complete access to our street if this trend continues.” 

Merchants group slams the brakes

In 2022, LionDanceME took over a pre-existing permit to close three blocks of Grant Avenue, and the company has renewed it annually ever since. On weekends, the group generally used one block for lion dancing. 

Following the most recent permit renewal, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency installed a street sign this March prohibiting cars from stopping along the three-block stretch without prior notice on any weekend. 

Merchants were surprised and bothered that the affected area would expand. “A metal sign means that this is no longer temporary, it’s permanent now,” said merchant Au. He is one of the merchants who first spotted the sign. 

They met with Lau and transit agency representatives and expressed their concerns. Lau agreed to limit dancing to one day per weekend, and only on one block, and city staff covered the sign so that drivers could stop along the street again. But less than a week later, the merchants discovered that Lau had gotten yet another permit, this time for amplified sound at the dance performances — and for full weekends. 

The merchants saw this as a breach of their agreement and got the Board of Appeals to temporarily put a hold on the permit.  

If the two groups fail to reach a compromise before the Board of Appeals hearing next week, the Board will decide whether to revoke the permit. 

Editor’s note (4/16/2024): An earlier version of this story named the wrong person as the author of the merchants’ online petition, and incorrectly described a type of event that company LionDanceME participated in. That information has been removed.

The post Chinatown Merchants Frustrated as Outdoor Events Disrupt Business appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

San Francisco again faced the specter of anti-Asian hate as two major cases captured public attention this month. 

On Friday, Asian American activists and community members rallied at the Hall of Justice against a judge’s decision to grant probation and mental health treatment, rather than issue a harsher sentence, to Daniel Cauich, who in 2021 stabbed Ahn “Peng” Taylor, a Chinese Vietnamese woman in her 90s. That was just weeks after the police department re-opened an investigation into the death of Yanfang Wu, an elderly Chinese immigrant who died after being pushed down on a sidewalk last year. 

The cases were reminders of why concerns persist over violence against Asian Americans in San Francisco — and of why the Coalition for Community Safety and Justice still exists. 

The coalition, a group of nonprofits serving the Asian American community, formed in 2019 in response to a wave of racially driven attacks. Its goals include increasing public safety through grassroots efforts like community-building and victim support, including for Taylor, Wu’s husband and about 80 other Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in this past year. The San Francisco Public Press accompanied staff from Community Youth Center, a coalition member, in the Richmond District in late 2023 during one of their frequent outreach events visiting Asian residents and businesses throughout the city.  

That day, outreach workers ducked in and out of various stores on Clement Street, home to many Asian-owned businesses. 

They tried talking to whomever they met: store owners, employees and sometimes people they passed on the sidewalk. They handed out flyers and small gifts like whistles and electronic keychains that played a siren with the press of a button. 

Outreach worker Lida Vatanadilogkul checked in with Thai merchants. “I would let them know that if they need any resources or if they know anybody who has been a victim of a hate crime or other incidents, we are here to help,” she said.  

Over the past three years, Vatanadilogkul and her colleagues have taken similar walks through commercial districts with significant Asian populations, acting as a reassuring presence and connecting people with services after harrowing encounters.  

“If something happens to you, we will be here,” said Henry Ha, the team’s leader. “We will follow up with you, we will walk you through the hard time to help you to recover and heal.”  

Recent data on hate crimes hints that San Francisco has become safer for Asian Americans. There were 60 incidents that merited anti-Asian hate crime charges in 2021 and 14 in 2023, police Sgt. Jamie Hyun said at a February committee meeting of the Board of Supervisors. But because those figures miss many types of potential bigoted behavior, they fail to represent the full public safety situation, Hyun said. Ha has found also that some victims, especially seniors, might not report incidents or seek help after being attacked. Many are immigrants who don’t speak English, which makes it challenging for them to file police reports or navigate the legal system. 

But if people don’t talk about what happened to them, Ha said, it could hamper efforts to prevent similar incidents. That’s why one of the team’s aims is to identify crime victims and help them report their experiences. Outreach workers speak many languages — Cantonese, Thai and Tagalog, to name a few — so that they can penetrate diverse communities. 

“If you speak the language, you will make a lot of elderly [people] feel more comfortable,” Ha said, “and they will share what happened with you.”  

Back on Clement Street, Ha met with Andy Wei, a locksmith whose store had been broken into and vandalized. He later helped Wei secure a $1,000 city grant to repair the damage. 

But the team’s work is about more than preventing and responding to crime. Members spend most of their time cultivating relationships. Their hope is that people will feel comfortable reaching out to them when facing situations they do not know how to handle. 

“We cannot do all the work by ourselves,” Ha said. “We also need to rely on the community to help each other look out for each other, to let us know who needs help.” 

The post As Attacks on Asian Americans Regain Spotlight, SF Group Seeks to Soothe Community appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The parade’s organizer, the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce, has announced the roster of floats and entertainers who will participate, including a 289-foot golden dragon that debuted in public on Lunar New Year’s Day, Feb. 10, for a Taoist “awakening” ceremony.

Typically, the dragon is replaced every six to eight years, said Harlan Wong, the parade director and a board member of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. The most recent dragon, purchased six years ago, suffered damage during last year’s parade, due to inclement weather.

While it could probably still be used, Wong said, organizers felt it was time to refresh the parade’s most iconic feature: “We want it to coincide with the year, to bring out a dragon in the Year of the Dragon.”

To celebrate the Year of Dragon, San Francisco’s Chinatown is hosting several art and cultural events as part of its Lunar New Year celebrations. These range from traditional activities, such as the flower market, to new initiatives like a pop-up store featuring Asian American artists at the Chinatown-Rose Pak Station, Muni’s newest Central Subway metro stop.

The passing of the golden dragon is the centerpiece of the annual procession. Following exquisite floats, costumed dancers and marching bands, a large team will maneuver the long, illuminated dragon down the parade route, concluding the Chinatown tradition for Lunar New Year.

The Chinese New Year Parade, the festival’s pinnacle event, is scheduled this Saturday. Until then, the new dragon is on display at Three Embarcadero Center.

Parade as a Public Expression

Chinese Americans have used parades to exhibit their culture and broadcast messages since the 1850s during California’s Gold Rush Era.

Chinese Americans participated in some of California’s earliest parades, including a San Francisco funeral procession for President Zachary Taylor in 1850.

Local newspapers first reported large dragon dance ensembles on San Francisco streets during Year of the Monkey celebrations in 1860. But the first well-documented parade in San Francisco’s Chinatown took place in 1887. It was organized by Yeong Wo Co., a district association that served immigrants coming from the same hometown in the Zhongshan area, Guangdong Province, near China’s southern coast. “We know that they imported a dragon and they had a customs problem,” said Lei. “They sued the government for lower duty and lost.”

David Lei said association members could have won their case but they didn’t have time to spare so they paid the import tax to meet their own August festival deadline.

Lei explained that the parade, dedicated to Hau Wong, a deity worshiped in Southern Canton, China, carried a significant message to the Chinese community beyond its religious implications. Parade participants associated Hau Wong with a loyal Song Dynasty general. Therefore, the celebration of this deity could symbolize a desire to restore Han Chinese rule.

For most non-Chinese spectators of the 1887 parade, the dragon procession and Chinese opera performances were the highlights. The parade drew high praise in local newspapers.

For decades, the Chinatown community organized parades for various causes, including elevating the neighborhood’s reputation, protesting discrimination and raising funds for charity, including for people in China whose lives were in turmoil during World War II.

Taking over the Narrative

When Chiou-Ling Yeh first researched the Chinese New Year Parade for her PhD dissertation 20 years ago, she was amazed. Originally from Taiwan, Yeh said parades are “more of an American tradition. In China, they don’t do a parade for the Chinese New Year.”

Hong Kong hosted its first Chinese New Year Parade in 1996, drawing upon the experience of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

The modern form of San Francisco’s Chinese New Year Parade took shape in 1953, when H.K. Wong, a Chinatown businessman and director of San Francisco’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce, decided to promote the Lunar New Year celebration to the rest of San Francisco.

Wong was the first reporter in Chinatown and served as marketing director for the renowned Empress of China restaurant. Frustrated by the way most local newspapers covered Chinatown, often focusing on gambling arrests, he opened up the previously private celebration, hoping to reverse the bad press.

In an interview featured in the book “Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown” (Stanford University Press), he said: “I thought this would be the appropriate time to invite our American friends to share in this happiness and to appreciate and learn things about Chinese.”

It was during the Cold War, when Communist China was perceived as an enemy. The parade served as more than just an ethnic festival. Featuring Chinese American veterans from World War II and the Korean War, it demonstrated Chinese Americans’ patriotism and loyalty to the United States, and their efforts to integrate into mainstream American society.

The parade has evolved. Its route weaves through more neighborhoods, and it has been promoted as a winter tourist attraction since 1963, when the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau signed on as a co-sponsor.

Local television stations began to broadcast the parade in 1988. It soon garnered national and international attention, attracting sponsors and drawing a wide audience.

Being featured on television significantly reshaped the narrative of Chinese Americans. “In the ’60s and ’70s, the only thing you read about Chinese Americans were tong wars, gang killings, and illegal contributions to politics, almost always negative,” Lei said. When the spotlight turned to the parade, organizers seized the chance to present their community in a different light: “We could explain our culture our way,” Lei said.

Evolving Message

Lei recalled that, as a teenager in 1964, he organized a group of friends to carry the golden dragon. Athletes from a martial arts school managed the head and tail, while his team helped carry the segmented body.

“We didn’t even really have to carry the dragon,” Lei said, laughing as he explained how spectators were happy to lend a hand. One person on their crew was designated to look for people in the crowd who wanted to participate. As the team carried the dragon through the streets, when one volunteer got tired, the crowd-spotting coordinator would find a replacement.

Serendipitous moments like that were lost when the parade transitioned into a televised event, Lei said. But new opportunities emerged and the parade evolved to carry new meaning.

“The parade here actually touched upon many issues, in the larger U.S. society and also within the Chinese American society, and also reflecting the issues within the Asian American community,” said Yeh, who later published her dissertation as a book, “Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown” (University of California Press).

While the parade served as a civic engagement tool for Chinatown, over the years it adapted to reflect broader societal changes, including efforts to advance civil rights, women’s and LGBTQ rights.

Organizers of the Chinese New Year Parade also supported other local communities’ parades, including San Francisco’s world-famous Pride Parade. In 1994, the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance became the first gay rights group to join Chinatown’s iconic parade, and it received enthusiastic support.

Parades continue as a means for communities to convey messages. Following mass shootings in Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park, a new public art project was unveiled at last year’s parade to bring together Chinese and Latina immigrant women designers.

For Lei, the Year of Dragon symbolizes the power of diversity, which he believes is highly reflective of America. In Chinese culture, the dragon is the most powerful mythological creature, with the best part of every animal, from claws of eagle to the body of a snake, he said. “When you absorb the depths of different cultures, you become the most powerful,” Lei said.

The post New Parade Dragon Carries on Local Legacy Dating Back Nearly 175 Years appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Yet for years, Cameron remained more of a tale than a real person in Tom’s mind. Until this Monday, when she stumbled upon pages of Cameron’s handwritten notes while digitizing century-old records stored at Cameron House, one of the oldest organizations in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

“It felt like stepping through a door into the past,” she said.

Tom is part of a volunteer group, led by community historian David Lei and University of California, Berkeley lecturer Anna Eng. They are working on a week-long project to scan boxes of documents — memos, letters, photos and other archived items.

The scanning project is a collaborative effort between historians striving to increase access to alternative historical sources and community organizations wanting the history to be restored and told.

The physical copies will be preserved at UC Berkeley, where researchers from around the world will have easy access to them.

Race Against Time

Community organizations often have limited capacity to store and preserve archives with proper temperature and climate control, especially when they are handling a hundred years’ worth of fragile records. The digitization project is a race against time, as many originals have deteriorated or been lost.

The team recently finished digitizing a portion of the archive for another organization in Chinatown, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, also known as the Six Companies. 

Established in the 1850s, it was once regarded as Chinatown’s City Hall and was known for helping newly arrived immigrants. It played a pivotal role in many civil rights lawsuits against the Chinese Exclusion Act, notably the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case, which established birthright citizenship in the United States.

The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association retains a significant trove of records such as meeting minutes and letters, revealing how Chinatown leaders aided members facing immigration challenges and detention. Until the recent document scanning session, many of its century-old source materials had not been thoroughly studied by historians and were at risk of deterioration.

Boxes of records were stored in a moldy back room and closet. On the second day of the scanning process, heavy rain flooded the floor where the boxes were stored. “Luckily, we were there,” said Lei. “The very reason why we need to scan it is just in case no one was there when the flood came.”

Digitizing archives is just the first step of preservation. Lei’s goal is to encourage organizations to protect original copies by sending them to a major institution to assist in long-term archiving and preservation.

Untold History

Lei, the community historian, has a passion for traditional Chinese culture. Upon retiring and selling his consumer product sourcing company in 2003, he shifted his focus to studying Chinese American history, which had been a longtime interest.

Lei noticed gaps in existing writings on Chinese Americans, as the sources he found often did not capture the full range of experiences, nor details about the regions and ethnicities of those who first immigrated to the U.S. Limited records from the first 50 years of Chinese immigration led historians to rely heavily on unreliable sources, like articles published in English-language newspapers.

Eng echoed Lei’s concern: “As historians, we cannot write the history, or we cannot write a different history, if we cannot access new sources that will add more complexity to the story.”

San Francisco is home to several organizations that played key roles in Chinese American history. Many lack digital copies of their own archives. Scholars sometimes seek access to the physical copies, but coordination challenges often lead these groups to decline such requests.

Having grown up in Chinatown, Lei stays connected with the community, which helps him initiate conversations about records conservation. He started the scanning project on a smaller scale with friends before expanding it to include the two oldest entities in Chinatown.

While sorting through files about women rescued at Cameron House, Tom discovered details that both amazed her and shifted her perspective. “These are all cursive,” she said, pointing to the letters likely written by women who were English learners. “For them to have perfected this language to the level of these writings is impressive,” she said.

It may take time for the Cameron House archive to become public and open to closer examination, but progress is underway.

The One-Point-Five Generation

Lei said many volunteers he has recruited are retirees with valuable cultural and language competencies. Their expertise is crucial in the archiving process, especially in identifying and recording dates.

“There’s a lunar calendar, a Republic of China calendar and a Western calendar,” explained Gregory Li, an experienced volunteer who is well versed in Chinese history.

Li, a retired lawyer, was born in America and can fluently speak and write Mandarin, Cantonese and Taishanese. He and other volunteers are what Eng would describe as “one-point-five generation” — those with strong connections to both their American communities and the immigrants who brought their families here.

The pattern of Chinese American migration has changed over time. Many early waves of immigrants came to San Francisco from Cantonese communities in and around southern coastal China. Eng said that members of the one-point-five generation often relate to the history of these groups because many of their families also came from that region or speak the same dialects.

Parts of Eng’s family have lived in the United States for five generations, but some relatives, including her mother, were kept out of the country under the Chinese Exclusion Act until an immigration law change in 1965. This personal connection fuels her commitment to ensuring that records from the era are preserved, and that this part of the community’s collective memory is not lost.

The post Volunteers Race to Preserve Culturally Significant Records in Chinatown appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

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Berkeley is accelerating plans to more humanely deal with homelessness in the wake of a San Francisco Public Press report on a chaotic encampment raid in October, and city staffers say they will start collaborating with unhoused people and homeless advocates when planning to clean or clear large encampments.

Several city departments are changing procedures in response to complaints from those living in encampments and their advocates, and from residential and commercial neighbors.

Here are some key changes:

• Berkeley will increase trash pickups to several times a week and do more frequent street cleaning to improve overall sanitation and living conditions.
• The city auditor is reviewing the effectiveness of the city’s homelessness services.
• The police department is reducing its involvement at encampment abatement operations.
• The fire department is providing unhoused people with basic fire safety guidelines.
• The city manager’s Homeless Response Team has taken steps to improve communication with residents at the largest encampments in West Berkeley through community meetings and new “Good Neighbor Guidelines” that explain what conditions would trigger a city intervention.
• The city has also applied to the state for an Encampment Resolution Funding Grant Award to lease a motel that it would use to provide temporary shelter.

In my capacity as a professional journalist, I reported for the Public Press on the aggressive October encampment cleaning that upended the lives of more than 50 people living near Eighth and Harrison streets and brought the city’s response to homelessness under scrutiny.

I was able to document and photograph the 12-hour encounter because it affected me, too. I am part of a community of people living in tents and vehicles who have been displaced from other encampments around the city, including the Berkeley Marina, the Gilman Underpass, Seabreeze, Ashby Shellmound, People’s Park, the Grayson Street Shelter, Here/There Camp, Shattuck Avenue and the Second Street camps. 

In the wake of photographic evidence from the October encampment cleaning, which exposed the city’s poor communication, lack of transparency, and failure to provide adequate shelter and support to unhoused people, city departments are under review.

Berkeley Senior Auditor Caitlin Palmer wrote in an email that, “We plan to work on the audit in the fall and hope to issue it sometime next year.”

The Berkeley city manager in July concluded an investigation of Berkeley police officers involved in the October encampment sweep who sent text messages that the Berkeley Police Accountability Board said showed “anti-homeless and racist remarks.” The city manager’s office, which hired an independent company to conduct the investigation, issued a report that the investigation found no wrongdoing. But the office has indicated that it will not release further details from the investigation, which it deems confidential.

Aiming for Clearer Communication

Peter Radu, assistant to the city manager, said the city acknowledged that it had mishandled encampment cleanings and used “overhanded” measures that included the destruction of personal property and giving vague, sometimes conflicting instructions to encampment residents. He acknowledged his own role in those events and said that he and the city wanted to work with unhoused people and homeless advocates to rectify the situation.

“I am genuinely sorry,” Radu said to community members gathered at Eighth and Harrison streets. “We’re trying to start something new, and work more with you as opposed to against you moving forward.”

On July 10, dozens of people gathered under and around a gray shade structure at Eighth and Harrison streets. Radu addressed the crowd of outreach workers and encampment residents to tell them that the City Council would soon approve a new shelter, referring to the planned motel conversion. He did not say whether the city would close the encampment, noting that Berkeley has more unhoused people than available shelter spaces, but said that residents in the area would be prioritized. The city has not announced a date for when it plans to begin operating the motel as a shelter.

“Call it a ‘closure’ or call it something else,” Radu wrote in an email asking for clarification about future plans for the encampment. “We do have (1) an opportunity to move people inside with a new resource, and (2) we do have infrastructure repair and construction needs in the area. People cannot live in construction zones.”

Radu’s efforts to establish trust have been met with mixed reactions from people living in the camp and their advocates. While some said they appreciated this newfound willingness to cooperate, others remained skeptical.

“You had consequences from your actions and now you are here,” said Chloe Madison, a camp resident on Eighth Street. “I’ve seen this side of you before, and I’ve also seen the guy who steals people’s homes.”

Many unhoused people say they continue to feel harassed no matter how much they do to avoid residential neighborhoods, because Berkeley staffers have shuffled them around the city with repeated encampment cleanups and closures.

“Just in the past few months, like Seabreeze. I’ve had like 10 camps in the last couple of years,” said Ron, a resident from the Second Street encampment. “You have herded us here.”

To address such grievances, Radu began working with two of the largest encampments in Berkeley, located near the intersections of Second and Page streets and Eighth and Harrison streets. He said the city and residents needed to find middle ground and take a collaborative approach to addressing the sanitation issues on the streets.

“There’s a competing need for space,” Radu said at an Eighth and Harrison streets community meeting. “So, we’re just trying to find a solution that keeps everybody safe and that allows the community to kind of have a shared use of this public space.”

In April, Radu held the first of three community meetings and presented a report to people living at the Second Street encampment, and said that if residents addressed safety concerns voluntarily, the city would not enter anyone’s vehicles or tents. He said that because of fire risk, residents would not be allowed to live in other kinds of makeshift structures.

Residents who attended the meeting said they were willing to work with the city, but many also shared their experiences of repeated property loss due to previous sweeps. Ron, who gave only his first name, recounted how he lost his belongings when he arrived late during the last cleaning at Second and Page streets. He said he jumped on the back of the garbage truck to salvage his personal belongings. He was able to save a few items.

“I was five minutes late, five minutes late, and I lost everything,” Ron said at the community meeting. “I had things that I carried from town to town. I had things in there for years.”

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Alice Barbee, who lives in the unhoused community at Eighth and Harrison streets, said the city previously gave instructions, which residents followed, and then discarded their possessions anyway.

“You say to get it all across the street if you want to keep it safe,” Barbee said. “But you come and you take that stuff, too. All of it and then call it trash?”

In May, residents of both communities asked for reassurance that no one would enter their households and throw away their possessions.

“We have not been as transparent and communicative as you guys would have liked and as we could have been,” Radu said to a gathering of Second Street residents. “I just want to acknowledge there were clearly misunderstandings and miscommunications on our account.”

In May, Radu tried collaborative cleaning at both encampments, asking residents to voluntarily address safety concerns highlighted in his reports. He deemed those events a success.

“We schedule a deep cleaning together and, voluntarily, give us what you don’t want,” Radu said to Eighth and Harrison residents, noting that the city staff had hauled away 11 tons of debris the previous week from the community living near Second and Page streets. “It was all voluntary. None of it was forcefully taken from anybody. We didn’t enter any tents.”

But the city does not have a policy for preserving the belongings of someone who is not on site when it conducts a cleaning operation. This means that residents living in tents or makeshift shelters risk losing their possessions when they leave their homes.

The city has also made agreements with surrounding businesses to keep people from camping on their sidewalks. Public notices are issued to residents camping outside of designated zones along Seventh and Eighth streets citing the city’s sidewalk ordinance and prohibition of bulky items in commercial corridors. The notices direct people to a shelter that closed in December and is no longer in operation.

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Sharing Public Space

In an effort to get everyone on the same page, Radu asked a few homeless advocates to give him feedback on a draft of unofficial guidelines to maintain general cleanliness in the neighborhood and improve interactions with the surrounding business community.

Radu said he hopes the “Good Neighbor Guidelines” will help establish a better working relationship between encampment residents and the city staff. He is seeking additional community input on the draft.

But the new procedures are challenging for a few residents who sleep on the open sidewalk and struggle with mental health issues. They are in survival mode and have trouble following rules about storing their belongings and discarding food scraps to avoid attracting vermin. And so, they are constantly at risk of having their possessions thrown away during weekly street cleanings.

“The Guidelines are rules the City wants people to follow. The guidelines say ‘Please,’ but behind that ‘please’ is the threat that if they are not followed, eviction, arrest, or a citation will result,” wrote Osha Neumann, a Berkeley civil rights attorney, in an email seeking his comment on the guidelines. “The City needs to realize that a great number of the people out there have significant disabilities, mental and physical, which make following rules difficult.”

The Public Press asked for reactions to the guidelines from Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín and all of the City Council members, about half of whom replied by email. Councilmembers Sophie Hahn, Ben Barlett, Rigel Robinson, and Mark Humbert declined to comment on the city’s response to homelessness despite multiple requests.

“These are temporary, common sense guidelines specifically for this neighborhood during the transition to the Super 8 motel,” Elgstrand wrote on behalf of the mayor. “These guidelines will help ensure the safety and security of encampment residents and neighbors.”

Councilwoman Susan Wengraf wrote that she agrees with what Berkeley city staff is doing and that “Berkeley is moving in the right direction.”

Councilwoman Kate Harrison wrote that “it is critically important that while the City makes these requests of unhoused and housed people in our community, it simultaneously provides the necessary facilities and services that allow people to follow them.”

Councilman Terry Taplin has already promulgated a version of these unofficial rules on his website as his district also grapples with homelessness. “The Good Neighbor policy both increases transparency around what triggers a city intervention and provides recommendations to better manage the public right of way better and improve traffic and fire safety,” he wrote, adding that the city could take further steps to improve encampment sanitation.

“Conditions can be improved by waste pump-out services,” he wrote, also noting that the city’s Homelessness Services Panel of Experts has also recommended expediting the search for a new parking lot for the safe parking program. But no money was earmarked for it on this budget cycle, according to Radu.

Harrison and Taplin agree that the city needs to implement other changes, such as providing more permanent supportive housing and transitional housing programs citywide, in addition to resolving sanitation issues.

The state grant would allow the city to lease the motel for two years, and the city hopes funds from Berkeley’s Measure P, which passed in 2019, would pay for three additional years.

“We are working with the County and our nonprofit service providers in finding solutions that enable us to provide access to shelter and services beyond the Super 8 motel,” Elgstrand wrote. “Even if this one location reaches full occupancy, we will continue to do everything we can to target resources to the residents of this encampment.”

Looking for Representatives to Show Up

Despite recent developments, some encampment residents said they felt frustrated and abandoned by Berkeley city officials. They wondered why City Council members and the mayor attended a recent Gilman District Business Summit to talk with business owners but had not attended any of the encampment community meetings.

“As long as you ostracize people, and their issues are not as important as others, then anger and resentment starts to come in,” Merced Dominguez said at an Eighth and Harrison community meeting, adding that she wanted to see the Gilman District’s Councilwoman Rashi Kesarwani attend a future meeting. “We just want to have a dialogue with her to work something out. This is what she was voted in to do.”

Kesarwani replied to a request for comment with a general statement but did not directly answer questions about recent policy changes and how Berkeley staff is responding to homelessness in her district despite multiple requests.

Madison, another encampment resident, expressed her frustrations over email, writing that she hadn’t heard about the business summit and questioned the timing of that meeting, which portrayed unhoused people disparagingly, blaming them for criminal behavior and causing others in the neighborhood to feel fearful.

“For you to attempt to approach us in good faith only days later is super skeevy,” she wrote to Radu. “Super cool how we’re all lumped into being scary crime doers when all I do all day is attempt to further my career in a way that works with my mental and physical health.” She added that “excluding us from that meeting allows those narratives to perpetuate.”

Radu responded to Madison that he had recommended including encampment members and community advocates at the meeting with business owners, but that the decision was not up to him.

“You’ll understand that I don’t get to make all those decisions, but since then I HAVE recommended to the business leaders that they reach out to you and try to have conversations,” he wrote, adding that “I agree completely with you that the format of the business meeting was not conducive to such trust.”

Some encampment residents are accepting, cautiously, what appear to be goodwill gestures.

“For a long time, I think it was a big battle. You guys don’t want to talk to us or work with us,” said Sarah Teague, a Second Street encampment resident, at one of the recent meetings.

“But you guys are making the initiative to come down here and talk to us personally. That’s a huge breakthrough,” she said. “I think it’s a big giant leap of faith for everybody.”

Full disclosure: Radu asked for Yesica Prado’s feedback on the Good Neighbor Guidelines and accepted a few suggestions to clarify wording but did not incorporate her other recommendations.

The post Berkeley Says It Was Aggressive in Homeless Encampment Sweeps, Promises Reforms appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

After 2½ years of meetings, community discussions, historical deep dives and policy generation, a panel tasked with proposing how San Francisco might atone for decades of discrimination against Black residents is ready to ask the city to step up and support equity rhetoric with action.

San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee is aiming to submit its final recommendations to the city on June 30, according to Brittni Chicuata, director of economic rights at the city’s Human Rights Commission. In the meantime, the city’s annual budget process is in full swing, which may affect funding and the timeline for whatever reparations policies the board decides to pursue.

The recommendations are nonbinding, meaning the Board of Supervisors may choose to support any number of the policies, or none at all. It can also amend them.

“Where the rubber hits the road is what that Board of Supervisors does,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco NAACP branch and health subcommittee lead for the reparations committee. “The ball is in their court.”

The recommendations, released only in draft form, number more than 100 and tackle disparities in educational achievement for Black students, differences in the median life expectancy for Black San Franciscans and the overrepresentation of Black people experiencing homelessness and incarceration.

In a March meeting, supervisors voiced support for reparations, unanimously voting to accept the draft in a nonbinding resolution. Of the proposed policies, some could be enacted quickly, while others would require more time. In some cases, advocacy at the state and federal level is required.

Breed must propose a city budget in June. Tinisch Hollins, vice chair of the reparations committee, said the group has been discussing how to secure funding in this year’s budget.

“We’ve been actively having conversations as a committee, looking at the recommendations that are what’s been called low-hanging fruit, that the city could potentially move forward on in this budget cycle,” Hollins said in an April interview. She noted that the majority of city departments have equity plans that could offer starting points for improving accountability and addressing the needs of Black residents.

“Since you have an equity plan, you can then reallocate or reconfigure your budget so that this becomes a priority for what you need to do,” she said.

An Office of Reparations

After its plan is submitted, the committee — which is authorized to operate until January 2024 — will continue meeting to discuss how the city can follow through on reparations.

Some community leaders are eager to ensure this work continues. Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents Bayview-Hunters Point, Potrero Hill and Visitacion Valley, introduced legislation in March requesting $50 million to establish an Office of Reparations that would help implement policies and find people eligible for programs.

Walton is trying to get the proposal on the agenda at the board’s Budget and Appropriations Committee, which is the first step before a budget request would go to the full board for a vote.

“If we get the supplemental heard and passed, obviously that will go into this budget cycle,” he said. “And then my hope is, of course, to be able to extend and get resources into the next budget.”

However, Breed indicated in late April that she had “no plans at this time” to back the proposal.

In response to recent questions about the mayor’s thoughts on the reparations plan broadly and how implementation of any policies would work without an Office of Reparations, her office wrote in an email: “The policies presented in the plan will be considered once they are final.” Instead of commenting on policy proposals, the email pointed to other programs that address racial inequity, such as the Dream Keeper Initiative and guaranteed income programs. The Dream Keeper Initiative provides down payment loans for first-time Black home buyers. The reparations plan suggests turning these loans into grants for those who qualify, among other housing-specific policy changes.

Walton is still trying to gain support from Breed and Board of Supervisors colleagues. If he fails to win over the mayor, he will need a veto-proof majority of eight supervisors on his side.

Breed’s lack of support for the office was disappointing to at least one committee member the day after it was announced.

“I haven’t talked to any other committee members, but I imagine they’re all discouraged right now,” said James Lance Taylor, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, who also sits on the reparations committee.

However, in the April interview, Hollins expressed what she called a “cautious optimism” that reparations work would move forward.

“If we do our work at helping to identify what’s immediate need, what the opportunity is, and then we collaborate with both the Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors, we’ll be able to start moving things downstream, even before we have an Office of Reparations, or whatever entity is going to be in place,” she said.

‘The Second Oldest Idea in Black Politics’

The committee’s draft plan spurred a wave of headlines across the country when it was made public. A proposal to give each eligible African American in the city a one-time payment of $5 million led to criticisms regarding cost, especially as the city faces a $780 million budget deficit in the next two years.

Support for reparations is skewed heavily by race. A 2021 Pew Research Center study shows that 77% of Black Americans support reparations, compared with 18% of whites.

Much like the California State Reparations Task Force, which recently voted to approve policy proposals for the state Legislature’s consideration, the San Francisco committee is running into the question: Why are reparations being considered in a state where slavery was never legal?

For his part, Taylor said the concept of reparations “is the second oldest idea in Black politics, the first one being abolition.”

Hollins said California shared responsibility with the rest of the country for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that compelled people in free states to capture those who had fled and send them back to enslavement out of state. California also at various times banned Black people from voting and failed to provide them with other legal rights and protections.

“California may have never had slavery as they put it, but the badges of slavery were here,” she said, adding that California “certainly supported all of the racist policies that excluded black people specifically, and that harm has had real consequences.”

Today, the lifespan of Black San Franciscans is 11 years shorter than the citywide average. Black households in San Francisco have a staggering low median income, $34,000 per year in 2019, compared with a citywide median of $112,000.

Urban Renewal

But slavery isn’t the only reason Black San Franciscans are pushing for reparations.

“Where people often think about slavery as the qualifying act that brings on the need for reparations, we know we have this very long history of deep housing discrimination and instability,” said Rachel Brahinsky, a professor of politics and urban studies at the University of San Francisco.

Starting in the 1930s, the federal government began denying Black borrowers loans based on a discriminatory housing practice known as redlining, in which certain areas — especially those with high concentrations of people of color — were deemed “high risk” for lending. Though redlining was a federal program, municipal officers as well as local bank officials, real estate agents and appraisers helped those creating the maps and designating risk. The maps informed local lending decisions in both the private and public sectors, which is how redlining contributed to racial disparities in homeownership, residential segregation and disinvestment from communities of color.

Brahinsky said racially restrictive covenants, which were rules written into property deeds that barred Black people from owning or renting these properties, as well as a practice in which real estate agents would encourage African Americans to move to certain parts of town when looking for homes, preserved segregation.

These policies contributed in part to the segregation of Black people into two main neighborhoods in San Francisco: the Fillmore and Bayview-Hunters Point. Both neighborhoods were later subject to another discriminatory housing program known as urban renewal. Under this federal program, which purported to remove “blight” from cities, the government seized land using eminent domain, and cities razed buildings to make way for new construction.

“The way that blight was defined, it was about peeling paint, it was about infrastructural problems,” Brahinsky said. “But it was also about people and was also about race very much.” She said that up to 20,000 people were displaced by the program in San Francisco.

“It drastically changed the community,” said Ericka Scott, a Black businesswoman who was raised in the Western Addition and now owns Honey Art Studio. “What was once said, originally, to remodel, redevelop, fix up the community, was really code for demolish the community, get people out of here and get new people in.”

Today, San Francisco’s Black population is an estimated 5.7%, compared with 13.4% at its peak in 1970.

Before urban renewal, the Fillmore was a thriving cultural hub with numerous jazz clubs and Black-owned businesses, and was known as the Harlem of the West. Scott’s gallery gives visitors a taste of what that was like through a series of photos from “Harlem of the West,” a book of photos by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts that chronicles the local jazz scene in its heyday.

Lily Robinson-Trezvant, 78, remembers hearing jazz music as she walked down the streets of the Fillmore during her childhood. Her family came to San Francisco in the wake of World War II. After living in military housing, her parents purchased a home.

“It was a beautiful two-story Victorian house. And it was perfect for our family,” she said. “They finally were living their dream. And just like they got it, they lost it.”

Robinson-Trezvant’s home was seized by the government, and her family moved to Plumas County near Reno, Nev. In compensation, they received “just nothing,” she said. “You couldn’t buy a house with what they gave us.” Her mother had a nervous breakdown. Eventually, the family returned to San Francisco, this time as renters, only to be displaced a second time when that home was torn down, she said.

In the years following demolitions, many plots of land remained vacant, said Lewis Watts, an archivist and co-author of “Harlem of the West.”

“For 20 or 30 years, the Fillmore almost looked like a ghost town. It would look like a war zone because there were a number of empty lots,” that remained undeveloped for years, he said.

Though it’s impossible to put a value on the trauma her family suffered, Robinson-Trezvant can point to the current value of her family’s first home. Unlike many buildings that were torn down, Robinson-Trezvant said her home was actually moved to the Mission District and she keeps tabs on it by checking real estate websites. The house is worth about $2.5 million today.

The Fillmore wasn’t the only African American community to be affected by redevelopment. Learning from what transpired further north, Black San Franciscans in Bayview-Hunters Point fought for redevelopment on their own terms, with some success. A group of Black women known as the Big Five secured $40 million in federal funding for new housing during redevelopment, but ultimately the neighborhood was hampered by a lack of investment in other areas, such as jobs, public transit and other factors like environmental racism.

[For a more in-depth exploration of how the Fillmore and Bayview-Hunters Point were affected by urban renewal, listen to the full “Civic” episode.]

Looking ahead

At the time of the interview, Robinson-Trezvant had not been following the reparations plan closely. However, she now has a copy of the draft plan, and said she wanted to read it through before forming an opinion on it. When asked if the city could repair past harms to the Black community, she said, “Anything is possible if you try and you care.”

Taylor, the political science professor, said he believed some kind of reparations would be approved, because these conversations are happening simultaneously across the country, and at the national level.

“We’ve mobilized hundreds of people in the city,” he said. “We’ve mobilized cities around America, where we’re inspiring people all over the planet.” Particularly children, who someday will be responsible for carrying on this work.

“We planted the seed for the next generation,” he added. “So even if we don’t win this battle, ultimately, if America can ever be right, we will win the war.”

Read the draft reparations plan.

The next African American Reparations Advisory Committee meeting is June 5 at 5:30 p.m.

The post SF Reparations Plan Nears Submission, but Funding Not Yet Secure appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

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