INSIDE
Keep the Presses Rolling! Pg. 2
OCTOBER 2019
Rising Homelessness Pg. 3
Goat Hill’s Goat Hoofprints Saved Pg. 4
Artwork Resurfaces in Bayview Pg. 6
called “Doggy Diner.” African Americans, making their last stand at the City’s southeastern edge, have become mostly a metaphor, symbolically represented by a handful of high-level politicians whose clan has moved to the East Bay and beyond. Family-owned businesses are folding, chased out by start-up-fueled rents that never stop rising, and the comfort brought by cardboard box-cluttered living rooms serviced by just-in-time deliveries. Fast going too, are the eccentrics, creatives, stubbornly iconoclastic characters that once defined Fog City. The fellow who lived in a shack alongside one of the few Transmutation. Lindahl’s art courtesy of the Intropy=Entropy Institute. remain ing daylighted BY STEVEN J. MOSS urban creeks, who knew the name of every native plant and animal, disapPeople are being swept out of San peared. The sprawling extended famFrancisco, washed away by pulsat- ily, blood-related or not, making babies, ing torrents of tech cash. Children, art, and dreamcatchers for sale at the always in short-supply in this Peter Alemany Farmer’s Market, departed. Pan playground, are being replaced Left behind is the latest layer of by a rising population of designer 20-something strivers, more interested dogs, who soon enough will have their in making a buck then giving a…and own dedicated restaurant, probably at least one 80-something philosopher-
scientist-artist, who has spent a halfcentury painstakingly separating spiritual-intellectual wheat from fast food chaff in a refurbished former movie theater located in what once was San Francisco’s industrial buckle. Harold Terry Lindahl trained and worked as an architect, designing Daly City’s Civic Center, and, during the 1980s, San Francisco International Airport’s boarding lounge, among other projects. But his life’s labor has been to understand and advance humanity’s place in the universe. During the great awakening that was the 1960s, and through the disco, greed, dot.com, and social media ages that followed, he dove deep into the teachings of philosopher George Ivanovic Gurdjieff, and engaged in intensive study of physics, biology, and other sciences. He collected a small tribe around him, dedicated to fostering self-awareness as a birth canal for higher consciousness, what he calls “pysvolving.” Along the way Lindahl had four w ives, ca red for seven ch i ld ren, hitchhiked around the world photographing architectural monuments, and drank countless glasses of coffee, mostly in the form of Gibraltars, at a neighborhood coffeehouse whose motto is “community in a cup.” He also created multiple art pieces that LINDAHL continues on page 4
Schools Ditch Sporks, Slowly Discard Plastic-Wrapped Meals Although Styrofoam trays and plastic straws have been banished from its cafeterias, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) still relies on individually packaged meals and disposable utensils for the bulk of the 6.8 million meals it serves annually. According to SFUSD estimates, the school system generates some 6.3 million gallons of landfill-bound trash, 9.4 million gallons of compost, and 12.4 million gallons of recycling every year. A significant amount of that entire “service volume” – a measurement of the total size of trash, recycling, and compost collected by Recology – originates at mealtimes. Based on SFUSD data, the District “diverts” – doesn’t landfill – approximately 66 percent of its solid waste stream, sending this material to be
Kids’ Photo Contest Winners! Pg. 19
Serving the Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, Mission Bay and SOMA Neighborhoods Since 1970
Last Philosopher in San Francisco
BY DANIEL IDZIAK
Cisterns Pg. 17
recycled or composted. Waste diversion is calculated by adding together the volume of recycling and compost and dividing that by the amount of all trash, recycling, and compost. By 2025, the District wants to avoid landfilling 85 percent of schoolproduced waste. According to Student Nutritional Services (SNS), the body tasked with overseeing food provision to the equivalent of a mid-size American city, starting this academic year the plastic-wrapped spork packet, long a fixture of school meals, is no longer being distributed, replaced by bulk recyclable, single-use plastic utensils and individual napkins, free of plastic sheathing. This change, according to SNS, will provide a better dining experience for students, and is expected to reduce the amount of plastic waste. SFUSD is the City’s largest meal provider, serving more than 37,000
daily repasts to 57,000 students. Most of this food is provided through a contract with Oakland-based Revolution Foods. Photographs from Revolution Foods’ website, as well as a 2019 San Francisco Chronicle article, depict meals resembling what one might expect to be served on an airplane: a thin-walled cardboard tray containing a plastic-wrapped hot meal in a plastic container with a small side dish in a smaller cardboard tray and a piece of fruit. According to SFUSD, the plastic used by Revolution Foods is “recyclable when clean” and BPA-free. This past Spring, concerns about food quality and taste led the school board to initially decline to renew Revolution’s contract, only to reup it on a subsequent vote. The San Francisco Chronicle cited price considerations LUNCH continues on page 6
FREE
Faces of Affordable Housing BY BETTINA COHEN
Denise Smith and her youngest son, Roland Byrd, Jr., 23, moved into 626 Mission Bay Boulevard in 2018. They’re the first family to occupy a twobedroom, one-bath townhome in the 100 percent below-market-rate (BMR) rental building, which opened last fall under Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC) management. Smith was born in San Francisco in 1956. Her family was displaced from their home in what became the Hunters Point Redevelopment Project Area by the former San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) when she was a pre-teen. They moved into the Ingleside neighborhood. In 1980, Smith settled in Bayview-Hunters Point, where she raised five sons. As a single mother during the 1980s and 1990s, gun-related fatalities and street violence took a toll on the family’s sense of well-being. A 2001 San Francisco Chronicle article cited feuding between small local gangs as the major cause of the area’s unsolved homicides over the previous decade. Smith started a career focusing on at-risk youth in 2002. She worked with Shawn Richard, executive director of Brothers Against Guns, and as a caseworker at the Mission Neighborhood Center, where she handled a caseload of 25 to 30 kids. But the “bad things” the family saw happening around them prompted her to seek a safer setting in the East Bay when Byrd turned 12, in 2008. HOUSING continues on page 13
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