From Community Contributor, Evelyn Gutierrez:
This is the new logo for La Plaza 16 Coalición / Plaza 16 Coalition (Plaza16.org), which is holding a community forum this Thursday, May 15th, from 6-8 p.m. at the Victoria Theatre. The meeting is part of an effort to oppose any luxury development at 16th and Mission streets.
Instead, the coalition advocates a “people not profit” sensibility, striving for community planning and decision making, community land ownership, housing those with the least first and an end to the criminalization and harassment of poor people and people of color.
Darn! How am I going to public urinate now?
“The one thing.” Either we do what the developers say or we support the worst of whatever is happening there now. The SFPD is containing social problems in the neighborhoods ripe for overdevelopment under the presumption that neighbors will demand development to cure the problem that the SFPD is causing.
I’d trust the city, the police and the developers a lot more than i’d trust a ragbag of assorted miscontents and miscreants such as compose this alleged “community” group.
I’d trust neither, preferring to assemble the neighbors to hear what we think should go up in our backyard and to proceed accordingly.
Planning is both a citywide and a neighborhood process, otherwise there would be one big citywide one-size fits-all zoning. Neighbors have been heretofore shutout of the process. And inappropriate out of scale zoning is the result.
The usual suspects were the ones granted stakeholder status by the Planning Department and this zoning represents their failure.
Just because some zoning regulations are local does not imply that only residents of that area get a say.
We have a planning process which that will determine variances when they are clearly in the public interest, as in this case.
There is always the ballot measure, referendum as needed. Prop B sails through, some Mission-centric Prop B would squeak through.
I love the groups demands: halt the project and deed the property over to the community. Community meaning what, exactly?