INSIDE
Publisher's View: San Francisco Pg. 2
OCTOBER 2023
Short Cuts Pg. 2
Wisconsin Street Speed Bumps Pg. 3
Hill Resident Lucho Ramirez Nurtures Latino Film Festival Pg. 3
Two Days in Dogpatch Pg. 5
Ice Cream Returns to the Hill Pg. 5
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Serving the Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, Mission Bay and SOMA Neighborhoods Since 1970
Incidences of Rape Decline, While Robberies and Murders Increase BY JESSICA ZIMMER
Between 2022 and 2023, San Francisco saw a three percent dip in overall crime and a marked reduction in certain offenses, including rape, down 17 percent; assault and burglary, both lower by seven percent; with no reports of human trafficking for involuntary servitude. Yet incidences of other crimes increased, including robbery, up 16 percent; and homicide, with a six percent rise. Trends moved in a similar direction in the southeastern neighborhoods, where robberies reported to the Bayview
and Southern stations increased by 19 percent in the last year; 407 incidents in 2023, up from 342 in 2022. Burglary was down 24 percent at these stations; 706 in 2023, 926 in 2022. A burglary is defined as entering a home or another building illegally, whether or not something is stolen. Robbery involves taking property from a person through threats or fear of harm. Bayview Station Captain David Maron said the major crimes that San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) CRIME continues on page 7
Families were invited to make bubbles at last month’s Secondhand Saturday at Crane Cove Park. "Two Days in Dogpatch" story on page 5. PHOTO: Jenna Duncan
Affordable Housing Slated for Pennsylvania Avenue BY REBEKAH MOAN
Mayor London Breed’s Housing for All plan, announced earlier this year, has a goal of building 82,000 new homes over the next eight years, with roughly 60 percent, or 46,000, slated to be “affordable.” A modest contribution to reaching this quite ambitious objective is a planned affordable housing complex to be developed at 249 Pennsylvania Avenue by Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC) and Young Community Developers (YCD). “While Potrero Hill and Dogpatch have seen significant residential development under the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, little of it has been affordable,” said Potrero Boosters President J.R. Eppler. “We look forward to working with the City and developers to deliver affordable housing at 249 Pennsylvania, a site that has been vacant for several years and become a blight to its neighbors.” The property, which sits between 999 Mariposa Street – the former location of Center Hardware – and Pennsylvania Street Gardens has suffered from illegal dumping and encampments for the unhoused, along with fires, theft, drug use, human waste, and used needles. With minimal municipal support, volunteers have struggled to maintain some level of civility in the area. This isn’t the first-time neighbors have heard about plans for housing at the property. In 2016, then-owners William Spencer and his son, Zach, announced that they were going to develop 999 Mariposa Street, along with adjacent parcels 249 Pennsylvania and a surface parking lot, into a mixed-use project. The family created an LLC in 2017, Czs Property Management, and contracted with architecture design firm D-Scheme
Studio to create renderings. In 2022 that relationship was terminated. The property has been neglected ever since. Czs didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. The new housing project will consist of roughly 100 units. According to TNDC senior project manager Alberto Benejam, planning is in the early stages, with a community engagement effort to be launched over the next few months to help shape 249 Pennsylvania Avenue’s characteristics. Designers and outreach consultants will be retained to ensure that the project is “anchored in an understanding of the neighborhood,” Benejam said. “We think this site would make an excellent location for family housing, given the robust amenities in Potrero Hill and the adjacent communities.” At least half the units will be twoand three-bedrooms, priced to be affordable to households making between 30 percent to 80 percent of the area median income, approximately $38,900 to $103,750 a year for a three-person household. All units will be rentals. “Affordable housing requires long predevelopment periods, so we don’t anticipate construction beginning for a few years,” Benejam added. “We’ll refine all these details further as the design and financing strategy progress.” The Hill site is one of five slated to be developed as affordable housing. The others are at 1234 Great Highway, developed by TNDC and Self-Help for the Elderly; 650 Divisadero Street, developed by Jonathan Rose Company and YCD; 250 Laguna Honda Boulevard, developed by Mission Housing Development Corporation; and 3300 Mission Street, developed by Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, Tabernacle Community Development Corporation, and
Mitchelville Real Estate Group. The site will benefit from state and local laws aimed at streamlining affordable housing approval and construction, including Senate Bill 35, which requires local entities to simplify endorsement of certain housing projects, as well as Housing for All reforms, such as reducing procedural requirements that impede housing production.
“We have a lot more work to do to remove barriers to getting housing built faster and advancing more affordable housing, but this is a great step and I want to thank the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development for their work to advance projects like these,” Breed said in a press release.
B Y C H A I TA N Y A T O N D E P U
school attendance and test scores, to a burst of gentrification that began in the late-1990s but has yet to create substantial improvements to Annex-Terrace. “Then came around 2005 when the district pitched the idea of starting immersion programs in elementary schools,” said Hatter. In jeopardy of being closed due to a dearth in enrollment, Starr King implemented a Mandarin Immersion (MI) program in 2006, joining SFUSD’s 16 dual-immersion program schools, all with long waiting lists. Once a school that served mainly Hill residents, including those living in Annex-Terrace, Starr King started attracting Asianand European-American families from other parts of San Francisco. Enrollment doubled by 2012. “Sounded like a great idea to me too, focusing on cultures and languages and giving our children an opportunity to learn a different language that could only improve their education…we thought…but as the immersion programs came in, the parents came with them,”
Starr King: One Campus, Two Schools Mosaics on the wall, the sound of kids laughing and playing in the yard, a painted eagle, and a sign that says, “LOV E TO L EA RN L EA RN TOGETHER”. This is what’s visible to a passerby on any given school day walking along Wisconsin Street on Potrero Hill’s southern edge. Starr King is one two San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) elementary schools located in the Hill, along with Daniel Webster. Originally constructed in 1913 on 25th and Utah streets at what’s now Bryant Elementary School, Starr King was rebuilt on 1215 Carolina Street next to the Potrero Annex-Terrace housing complex in 1958. Edward Hatter, Potrero Hill Neighborhood House (NABE) executive director, now in his 60s, grew up in the neighborhood and witnessed how it’s evolved over the years, from a workingclass community filled with families in the 1950s and 1960s, white flight to the suburbs, the lingering effects of the crack epidemic in the 1980s that especially beset Black families, impacting
STARR KING continues on page 9