On Thursday June 2, 2016,, I joined dozens of people who live or work in San Francisco’s Mission District at the San Francisco Planning Commission to speak up against yet another huge luxury housing development proposed for the neighborhood. The activist-dubbed “Beast on Bryant” adds 196 more luxury units to a neighborhood already built out way in excess of the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, and removes tens of thousands of square feet of badly needed light industrial space. The project was opposed by the San Francisco Labor Council and the Building Trades Council.
While the Planning Commission’s tendency to rubber stamp housing projects is infamous and nobody really expected the project would go down to defeat, the surprising part of the day and evening spent at City Hall was the full court press of the San Francisco Sheriff’s department. Why were the sheriffs intervening in Planning Commission decisions? Was this on someone’s order?
When I arrived at 3:00pm, the scene outside of Room 400 at City Hall was complete chaos. Scores of burly carpenters from the Northern CA Regional Carpenters Council all wearing jackets saying “CIA”, were roaming the hallways along with dozens of Mission District residents. The Carpenter’s Council had broken from the Building Trades Council and hatched an independent deal with developer Nick Podell.
An inquiry at the door to the hearing room led to being told by a sheriff the hallway was about to be “cleared out”. Not wanting to be “cleared out”, (whatever that meant), I tiptoed away and found a quiet spot some distance away.
About an hour later, I ventured back to the hearing room, peered in, and saw 70% or more of the seats were now occupied by the dozens of carpenters who had been milling about in the hallway. There was a long line to the right of the door filled with other people. I asked for admittance to the room as I was planning to speak and was told to get in line, despite at least 5 visible empty seats in the room. I pointed out I had been there an hour ago and had been told to leave or get cleared away. I wasn’t told to get in a line. So why was I not at the front of this line? That didn’t go over well.
After being invited inside the hearing room by a colleague on a bathroom break who told me there was a seat empty behind her, I found myself accosted by the Sheriff insisting I could not sit there. I asked point blank if all the seated people had arrived more than 90 minutes ago, as I had, and if they all intended to address the commission on the item now up. The sheriff raised his voice and the meeting was briefly interrupted. I left to avoid further disruptions and spent another 90 minutes in the hallway line watching numerous people being admitted to the room in front of the people in line.
Eventually, we hallway people observed that names were being called to speak during public comment although the people called had still had not been admitted to the room and were in the hallway line, or an even bigger group in an overflow room way down the hall, or simply idling elsewhere in the building. We attempted to exchange names and install a runner system to notify people if their names had been called for public comment.
After finally being admitted, more than three hours after arrival and after three aggressive encounters with the sheriffs, I was escorted to a seat between two carpenters. In the two and a half hours I spent in that seat waiting for my three minutes to address the Planning Commission, I had a ringside seat to the phenomenon called man-spreading as occupancy of my seat was somewhat contested.
I finally addressed the Commission, mostly to say the luxury housing threshold in the 25 year duration Eastern Neighborhoods Plan had already been surpassed in the first seven years, the anticipated loss of light industrial space was at 2/3 of the limit in 1/3 of the time anticipated and I wasn’t sure where the “planning” was in Planning Commission. I tried to hang in for the duration of the hearing, but was defeated by the incursions into my sitting space. There were thoughts about the discreet use of elbows, but I figured the sheriffs were clearly not on my side should there be an altercation.
Neither of the two carpenters surrounding me, nor 99% of the 70+ filling up the meeting room, made a public comment to the commission despite occupying virtually all the seats for hours on end.
To get to the end of the story, the Beast on Bryant project was approved. Mission District residents were successful in getting a significant increase in the amount of light industrial space that would be recreated in the new project. They deserve plaudits for that hard-won victory.
But many of the people who just wanted to speak their piece about what was happening in their neighborhood experienced inconvenience, harassment, discomfort, unpleasantness and intimidation. They came, not on a payroll but on their own dime, and definitely took second fiddle to an organized campaign designed to make it as hard as possible for them to have their say. That’s just plain wrong.