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By Rupert Clayton, HANC Housing & Land Use Chair

Note:  Part One of this article appeared in the April 2018 issue of the Voice and can be found online here.

Formation

With a few self-appointed local board members, a $100/hour consultant and a cheerleader from DPW, the green benefit district (GBD) formation committee is ready to roll. Their challenge is to find a way to get the owners of 30% of local property to sign a petition backing their plan (more on exactly what this means below). Other California cities have a 50% threshold, but not us. Thanks to changes during the Newsom administration, San Francisco has other unique GBD provisions, such as allowing residential property to be included (elsewhere in California, these districts apply only to commercial property) and allowing the eventual GBD to repay costs incurred by the formation committee.

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HANC's monthly (except August) general membership meeting is usually held downstairs at the Park Branch Library, 1833 Page Street (between Cole and Shrader) on the second Thursday of the month, beginning at 7 pm.  Our meetinngs are open to the public and free to attend.

Election Day for this year’s Primary Election is June 5, but early voting begins on May 7.  Our April and May general meetings will provide information on some of the local ballot measures.

We will begin with Proposition F, which HANC has endorsed.  Prop F, if passed, will require San Francisco to provide a free attorney for any San Francisco resident who receives an eviction notice.  Aditi Sherikar, an activist and attorney associated with the campaign, has been invited to give us an overview and to respond to any questions.

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By Christin Evans, HANC Board Member

  Lava Mae, the nonprofit which operates mobile hygiene services including bathrooms and showers, temporarily ceased Haight street operations earlier this April in response to neighbor complaints.

In May 2017, neighborhood groups including HANC supported the addition of the mobile operator to supplement existing services offered to area homeless.   After a number of possible locations in the neighborhood were evaluated, the curbside outside of the Larkin Street Referral Center at 1317 Haight Street was chosen.  The original idea was that by locating near another service provider with a drop-in, clients could wait for their shower slot comfortably inside.  However over time, Lava Mae found that a number of their clients did not fall within Larkin’s client restriction which is ages 12-24 so the line of waiting shower clients was moved onto the sidewalk.

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By Rupert Clayton, HANC Housing & Land Use Chair

Coming to your neighborhood very soon is a hip new concept for funding and controlling local services – the “green benefit district”. Local grandees are trying to launch one for the Inner Sunset and there’s already one up and running for Dogpatch and Potrero Hill. There’s also a proposal for a “Greater Buena Vista Green Benefits District” with the potential to encompass all of the Haight Ashbury. It sounds warm, fuzzy and eco-friendly, right? But what does it really mean?

Green benefits districts (GBDs) are the green-washed version of community benefits districts (CBDs), which are the residential cousin of business improvement districts (BIDs). San Francisco has 15 CBDs or BIDs already, covering areas from Fisherman’s Wharf and Union Square to Noe Valley and the Castro/Upper Market. The official line is that each district is a voluntary agreement by the owners of a majority of the property within its boundaries to levy an assessment (basically, a tax) on property to fund local services.

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