Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Ahsha Safaí. Read earlier dispatches here.
The fog rolled in on the Upper Great Highway around noon on Tuesday, and dozens of cars drove down the oceanside road.
Two blocks east of the highway, some 15 business owners of the Outer Sunset Merchant Association met with major mayoral candidates at the Outerlands restaurant on Judah Street and 45th Avenue, where the Upper Great Highway’s potential closure is on the top of everyone’s mind.
A 2-mile stretch of the highway connecting San Francisco’s westside to Daly City and regions further down the Peninsula may be quite different after Election Day, if a ballot measure mandating its closure passes.
The issue has become hotly contested: Dueling rallies took place over the weekend featuring merchants and residents both for and against the measure.
On Tuesday, mayoral hopeful Ahsha Safaí showed up around 11 a.m. and delved right into the fray.
“When you have a seven-mile beach and you have Golden Gate Park and you have Lake Merced, we don’t need green initiatives out here,” said Matt Lopez, owner of Pitt’s Pub and White Cap bar, one of the more outspoken attendees at the meeting. “We need to be able to navigate our lives.”
“You are fixing problems that didn’t exist out here,” said another merchant. “And you are going to create problems with these mandates, with the closure.”
Others were less adamant about keeping the road open to cars, but worried that passing the ballot measure without a concrete plan for traffic and infrastructure improvement would backfire.
Those improvements — installing timed traffic lights on Sunset Boulevard, building more bathrooms, managing the diverged Great Highway traffic — were “bypassed” by putting the measure on the ballot, said Shane Curnyn, who goes to the beachside road with his daughter on weekends.
“My fear is that it’s just going to be a Wild West,” Curnyn said. “There’s going to be no police. There’s going to be no facilities for people to use. It’s just going to be a closed road without a plan for how the park is going to be built and maintained.”
Prop. K, which was put forward by District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio and supported by Mayor London Breed, would permanently close the Great Highway between Lincoln Way and Sloat Boulevard so the city can turn it into an oceanfront park.
The measure has already seen some heavy spending: The family of Matt Boschetto, a District 7 candidate, has put in $67,000 to a committee opposing the measure; on Tuesday, the ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear put in $75,000 to support it.
If the measure passes, the Upper Great Highway won’t close until “all necessary approvals are obtained and permits granted” or by the end of 2025, when the current pilot program closing the roadway on weekends is set to expire.
When asked about his position on the ballot measure, Safaí was circumspect, talking about his work with former Supervisor Katy Tang on the seawall and water-treatment facility. But he ended his thoughts saying he is “for reimagining that space” and would “100 percent address the concerns.”
Outside of the room, Safaí did not hesitate to say “Yes on K.”
“I’ve been a supporter of that idea for three years now,” Safaí said. “We need to do something bold, and it’s an opportunity.”
Although some opponents of the ballot measure argued that building the oceanfront park might hurt businesses nearby, Safaí did not hear that argument on Tuesday, he said. “I just heard, ‘What is the overall plan if you are going to make a park? You better have community input and let us have a say in it.’”
In December 2022, Safaí was one of the nine supervisors who voted for keeping the Great Highway car-free on holidays and weekends — a pandemic pilot program. But he took a different position on another major road closure in the city, voting against the closure of John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park earlier that year.
“I was 95 percent of the way there,” he said. “I wanted them to add some disabled parking right next to the Conservatory of Flowers. That was all I really wanted in the end. There was a proposal to do that but, ultimately, it was all or nothing.”
In explaining his position on the Great Highway, Safaí also took the opportunity to segue into his city planner background — but later in the response, the attendees seemed to lose interest. He got the room’s attention back when he started criticizing the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority’s project management.
“First thing I would do is to shift it over to the department that actually has that work, because [SFMTA] do not do a good job of it,” Safaí said. “They do a horrible job on the community outreach part. They kind of post a flier, say we had a meeting, and then they go with their decision anyway.”
The crowd nodded in agreement. “It even felt weirdly secretive,” one of the business owners said. “We are trying to ask questions, and they are like, ‘Why are you asking that question?’”
Many westside voters rely on cars to get around the city, and road closures and loss of parking spaces has always been a big issue in the neighborhood. Safaí tapped into that undercurrent and endeared himself to the business owners in the room with his own experience living in the Excelsior.
When he first took office in 2017, Safaí said to the merchants, the city wanted to take away supervisors’ parking spots in front of City Hall. “I told the reporters, ‘Guys, I can’t do this job without a car and being a good dad,” he said, emphasizing how he needed to drop off his two kids, or show up at a burglarized storefront past midnight as a supervisor.
But, road closure or not, it seemed that the Outer Sunset merchants just want to be heard when decisions are made about their neighborhood — be it parking, the upzoning plan or MTA projects.
“Some guy sitting downtown saying, ‘I imagine this for that neighborhood.’ That doesn’t really work for us,” said one business owner. “We live out here. You can’t imagine for our neighborhood. We should be part of the imagination team.”
Correction: Curnyn said timed traffic lights should be added on Sunset Boulevard, not Lincoln Way.
As we learned the other day, Rec&Park tell us they don’t have the staff for the amenities we already have – public pools. Question that needs to be answered: Where’s the staff and funds supposed to come from for running such an ocean front park? Are they going to close pools like Garfield for an additional day of the week to pull staff and reduce cost there?
1. This is a ballot measure, it has nothing to do with candidate A or candidate B.
2. Merchants don’t have special rights, weren’t elected, and don’t represent citizens of their neighborhood.
3. This regards public infrastructure used by the whole city, the local neighborhood has no special claim to it. The Outer Sunset doesn’t own Ocean Beach. If you don’t like it, don’t live in a city.
4. Sea level rise is going to wipe out UGH anyway.
Explain to me how merchants on Judah or Taravel are going to get less business if it’s easy for people to get to and from Ocean Beach Park? These are pedestrians that don’t have to cross an underutilized freeway.
“My fear is that it’s just going to be a Wild West” – its’ going to be tag city for sure, a dirt bike mayhem destination?
Yep, like in the later years of Playland at the Beach.
Luring all of the dirt bikers to a sandy road might be an improvement over them roaming all over the city.
‘When asked about his position on the ballot measure, Safaí was circumspect’
‘Outside of the room, Safaí did not hesitate to say “Yes on K.”’
Yup, he’s a politician.
Any idea I had of including Safai in ranked-choice voting (he’s pro-Union and I like that) is kaput. Why have a meeting when you already side with Prop K? Traffic in the Outer Sunset and Parkside neighborhoods has gotten awful and dangerous bc more and more people are driving too fast out of frustration that there are fewer and over congested passages through the area. Sunset Blvd, 19th Ave and Lincoln are more clogged than ever.
SFMTA needs new management because traffic calming measures ain’t cutting it (bulb outs, road bumps, all that other Vision Zero bull crap modeled
after cities like Rotterdam (what? how these non profits like Walk SF and other policy makers- note not road engineers -get the city to do their bidding is insane) is obviously not working.
No way on Prop K because per usual our city can plan for shite.
Carpetbagger Engardio sold out the district to Breed’s corrupt techie-riche BSers.
They literally claim closing the GH will “help the environment and create urban green spaces that help cool the planet.” – A dedicated team of liars, bar none.
Throw them out of SF. FIRE CORRUPT BREED, RECALL ENGARDIO!
Safai’s heart may be in the right place but this is just mindless and anti-Sunset.
We sure don’t need Twitch CEO’s from Noe and the Haight “planning” by dictate without listening to residents, disabled, elderly, working-class, commuters, all just to placate yuppies who don’t live in our hood in the name of “reenvisioning” us.
ENVISION A REAL JOB, REAL ESTATE SELLOUTS.
Oh of course Mac Truong is anti-pedestrian and anti-urbanism. No wonder this person spends insane amounts of time trolling the SFYIMBY blog.
Dude, when are you going to wake up and realize you’ve been thoroughly adopted as the billionaires’ Useful Idiot? You oppose new housing because you think someone will make a buck off of it and ‘property is theft,’ but you don’t want anyone in the Sunset to get up and down the west side of the neighborhood safely without a car?
I have news for you. The property magnates are THRILLED that housing continues to be unaffordable for most and that you’re doing their job for them opposing safe alternatives to driving. Their investments in Waymo and the housing market sure are paying off swimmingly!
What doesn’t seem to be mentioned are all the locals who use this road daily, but also there are 20,000+ commuters to the Peninsula and to the other side of the Richmond, Sunset, Parkside, that use this road everyday. Every day there’s a long line of cars turning left onto Lincoln from the Great Hwy, to then turn right to travel across residential streets that were not planned for heavy traffic, or creating even more traffic on Sunset & 19th Ave. Not a good thing happening to their constituents.
You might be interested in learning that *no matter what,* a backup and awkward left turn will be inevitable, because in the next year or so the Great Highway Extension which connects UGH to Skyline Blvd will close forever. And that is not up for a vote.
People outside the outer sunset shouldn’t be deciding the transportation options. Also, folks drive to enjoy the great highway (then clogging up the neighborhood) …how is that eco conscious?
EXCUSE ME,just because you live closer does not give you ownership of this public land. It belongs to ALL SAN FRANCISCANS not only those a few blocks away.
It’s entirely appropriate that San Franciscans should decide policy in their own city. And do you want to bet that all the big funders behind the ethically challenged Open the Great Highway (NO on Prop K) campaign are western SF residents? Not likely.
“We are trying to ask questions, and they are like, ‘Why are you asking that question?’” How do you think I feel? I wonder where I work? Hmmmm. Just make more podcasts, it’ll be alright.