rinse cycle

The City and the Board of Parks and Recreation has finally closed the eviction saga on the Haight-Ashbury Recycling Center. The recycling center served a purpose long ago when recycling centers were rare, and curbside recycling but a green dream. But in the past 15 years, the eastern end of Golden gate Park has become dense with homeless, drugs, crime, and vagrants determined to make the park their own realm of squalor. I am not insensitive to the plight of the urban homeless, and used to be active in Old First Presbyterian's faithful response to homelessness. However, I am also a passionate support of parks and nature preserves. And those camped at the eastern end of the Park (my neighborhood) are not "down on their luck" or looking for a place or way off the streets. These are either drug-addled are disturbed, and increasingly violent people. Just this week one such person at the Stanyan and Haight entrance to the park laid down and blocked traffic, then seriously wounded the two police offers who stopped to offer aid. The young people who flock to the Haight to do drugs and "hang out" indefinitely just piss me off (aka "trustifarians" as some live off trust funs while the hip it out in the Haight. They can't afford food or shelter, but sport thousands of dollars in ink and piercings.). And they have pushed this liberal San Franciscan [this close] to becoming that old guy who yells at them to get off his lawn. As it is I sometimes shout, but too often just shrug, as they piss on our stoop doorway, defecate in our driveway, and break into our cars. And yet the price of a one bed-room place is $1,700/month, or $750,000 to buy in this otherwise wonderful neighborhood.

Drug addiction and street crazy are real, serious urban problems. But is is not the mission of the park system to address them. HANC, the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council, consists solely of old, former hippies who think we can all just hug it out in the Park. And they have fought tooth-and-nail as the established neighborhood political power group, against the objections of the other coalitions of neighbors and local businesses. Long ago the "recycling center" became the ATM for the homeless, and according to all non-HANC accounts, for drug buys. The City pays dearly for curbside recycling, and the curbside recycling company can only operate by recouping some of its expenses from the recyclable materials they collect. So now every resident dutifully separates their recycling, and once a week puts it out on the curb, where it is legally a crime to steal it as that is the currency used to pay for the recycling service. But once the big blue bins hit the curb, the scavengers come by, rummage through (although sometimes tidily), take anything with a redemption value, haul it away, and wait until morning where they can exchange it for cash down the street, and then drugs again just mere feet away. This is readily observable and repeatedly documented. As the eviction process got increasingly hostile a couple of years ago, the center added a small "native plant nursery" inside in an attempt to legitimize their use and continuing operations (We're in the park! We have plants! It's wrong to evict us! Please ignore the rampant drug abuse and violence!).

The City has very limited resources for either its green environmental programs (like curbside recycling and composting) or green environment programs such as Parks and Recreation. HANC wants to keep the center to serve the homeless. The Center is on Park land and falls under their responsibility and liability.

I reiterate: Homelessness and drug addiction are problems worthy of attention. It is not the Mission of the park to address them. Cash for stolen materials to fund drug abuse is not an appropriate allocation of citizen, City, or Park resources, nor something to be preserved in a residential neighborhood.

The Park and City have been trying to shut this blight down for more than a decade. The lease was up ten years ago. The final, final eviction came in November. The HANC has been all but violent against the closure for years.

After two years (three?) of eviction notices and protests and refusals to vacate, the City and the Sheriff took the only option remaining to them to fulfill due process: They bulldozed the place.

And in true San Francisco nutter fashion, protestors threw themselves in font of it. See the ABC news piece. However, the 1,000 people the HANC president claimed to have pledged to chain themselves to the center last year never appeared. It was closer to three.

The planned future park use is for a community garden, which is in keeping with the hopes of the actual neighbors (not HANC, the center is near neither Haight nor Ashbury) and the mission and charge of Parks and Recreation.

I had noticed that it was finally gated off, but I didn't notice it gone when I walked home last night. I'm looking forward to seeing what the site looks like now, and very much looking forward to seeing the site in the future.

Update:
Here's the view from my walk this morning. a backhoe was still moving bits around.