Supervisor Ahsha Safaí’s commute to City Hall was unusual for him on Thursday. While he usually drives after dropping off his kids at school, Safaí yesterday showed up on his blue bike at 8:20 a.m., in a khaki green jacket and blue sneakers instead of his typical blazer and leather shoes.
He then biked to City Hall from the Cayuga Street and Santa Ynez Avenue intersection, a slow street bordering Mission Terrace and the Excelsior, a seven-minute downhill ride from his house.
Part of the San Francisco Bike Coalition’s Bike to Wherever Day, the bike ride was one of the five group rides leading to a rally at City Hall. The ride seemed easy for Safaí — he only stopped briefly on the uphill stretch of Bosworth Street to wait for this reporter to catch up.
At the 9 a.m. rally, Safaí was joined by his colleagues who also showed up with their bikes. Mayor London Breed was the first elected official to address the crowd, boasting of having built 41 miles of protected bike lanes in San Francisco. Then she apologized for missing the bike ride from the Fillmore that morning.
“But I made it here,” she said. “It was early. It was early in the morning,” referring to the hour the bikers set off.
That was hardly a problem for street safety and bike advocates, who have been more concerned with Safaí’s opposition to car-free JFK Drive in the Golden Gate Park. They said he was on the wrong side of the Board of Supervisors’ 7-4 vote in favor of keeping JFK Drive car-free in 2022. The decision subsequently moved onto the November ballot and voters decided to keep cars off the drive for good.
Looking back, Safaí called that “some confusion.”
“I wasn’t against JFK,” Safaí said, explaining that he worked on a compromise of adding more disabled parking with the Mayor’s Office, but it didn’t pan out. “Out of respect to the seniors and some of the disabled community, I said, ‘If you make these tweaks, I’m 95 percent of the way there.’”
By the time Safaí got to the Mission on his bike around 11:30 a.m., after attending the rally and a committee meeting, he was back in his suit.
Safaí figures to be in the Mission a lot more often. His campaign office is moving into the vacant ground floor of the U.S. Bank building at 22nd and Mission streets by the end of the month, Safaí’s campaign manager Lauren Chung said.
The team just got the keys yesterday and the space is still empty, with the bank’s safe open and intact.
Still, Safaí made sure he let business owners know that he would be easily accessible on Thursday’s merchant walk down Mission Street.
“My campaign headquarters is going to be right across the street,” he told Silvia Ferrusquia, owner of the Latin Bridal on Mission Street. He went on to endear himself more by mentioning all the quinceañeras he saw at City Hall: “This is where it all comes from!”
Ferrusquiawas largely positive about the changes in the neighborhood — she said she has seen cleaner streets and fewer unhoused people. But she was concerned about illegal vending on Mission Street. “If people are buying something, they are provoking the people to sell. It hurts businesses,” she said.
Safaí was quick to reassure her that he supported Supervisor Hillary Ronen’s legislation to update the enforcement of the ban: Instead of requiring a written warning, the city will be able to clear vendors who do not move 10 minutes after they receive a verbal order — and enforcement officials can confiscate their items.
But it’s unclear how much effect that will have on Mission Street vending, as earlier efforts to allow permitted vendors on the street had proved chaotic. The vending ban has prevented vending at the plazas as long as police and Public Works staff are on site.
As Safaí walked between 23rd and 24th streets, people were selling presumably stolen items on the sidewalk, just half a block away from the BART plaza, where Public Works staff and police officers were stationed. Most of them were there with portable bags, suitcases or selling from a car.
In the meantime, licensed venders are struggling to make ends meet after moving to the two city-operated vending locations along Mission Street. Already, slow sales closed one of the locations, El Tiange.
“There’s no sales. There’s nothing. All my profits are going to the trash,” a vender named Juanita told Mission Local earlier, gesturing to a wilted bunch of roses she had thrown away. “We need support so we can go back to Mission Street. We need help.”
Although Safaí ended his Mission merchant walk at La Victoria bakery, just across from La Placita, he didn’t go in for a visit on Thursday.
Safaí seems comfortable in the Mission, conversing with business owners and pedestrians in Spanish. In his Tenderloin walk on Wednesday, he generally stuck to businesses that his guide introduced him to, but in the Mission, Safaí was more spontaneous, walking into any store he deemed fit.
Along the way, he gave out flyers and wrote down his number, something he’s done a lot on his campaign trail. “He loves giving his personal phone number,” said Chung, the campaign manager who also worked on Safaí’s supervisorial re-election campaign in 2018.
At the end of the walk, an Excelsior resident walking in the Mission approached Safaí and complained about lighting and unlocked gates at a playground two houses down from her place. She said neighbors have submitted a petition, but never heard back.
“I’m texting my staff right now,” he said, tapping on his phone. “And telling them we need to follow up on lighting and locking the gate at Excelsior Playground.”
On Friday, Safaí will return to his own district, starting the day on Geneva Avenue.
Rudely blocking the sidewalk wall to wall – he’s one of us!
Safai is a hack, a phony, and a poser. Ask most of his District 11 constituents what they think of him, and I guarantee you most have never see him, heard of him, or have anything good to say about what he’s accomplished in the last 8 years. He has ZERO knowledge of what it takes to run a city: he’s a grifter and has unsavory political ties to real estate developers. Anyone who thinks he should be Mayor is nutty as a fruitcake.