Home
(Depot) is where the heart is. It’s
becoming the Flying Dutchman of San Francisco. Last year unhappy
citizens drove it out of a proposed resting place in Visitacion
Valley. (Was it haunted, I wonder, by the ghosts of generations of
Schlage Lock employees rising up and crying out, “No, not here”?)
Now Home Depot has proposed to move into the space at Bayshore &
Cortland once occupied by Goodman’s Lumber and Whole Earth Access.
Joseph Smooke, writing in the New Bernal Journal, notes that “businesses
like Home Depot cause two phases of change. First there is blight as
smaller businesses fail in the face of competition; then larger
businesses take the place of the previous businesses, because a new
scale of competition now dominates the economic context.”
The monster home improvement store may have no
better luck in this new location. Watching over the area and poised
for intervention is the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, already
heady with success in the creation of affordable housing/community
services at the intersection of Mission and Cesar Chavez.
The fat lady’s singing. According
to an April
6 article in the San Francisco Business Times entitled “Mid-Market
turns to skid market,” it’s all over: “If rents have tumbled
in the Financial District and plummeted in the heart of South of
Market, they are virtually in free fall in the Class B and C
buildings in further-flung traditional industrial areas like
Mid-Market and far South of Market.” Adds author Amanda Bishop,
likely tenants in these areas are now not dot.coms but — I kid you
not! — non-profits.
Two properties that have been begging for tenants
are 1047 and 1069 Market, located in the depths of what Starboard
Commercial Real Estate principal Stella Wong Florez calls “the
armpit of San Francisco.” Bill Schwartz, former owner of the
Eureka Theater, might compare it to a different body part. According
to the Examiner of April 10, Schwartz feels that Mid-Market’s
strip clubs are impeding the conversion of the area to “something
akin to 42nd Street west,” complete with small theaters
and imported Broadway performances. Schwartz, adds Matt Isaacs in
the Ex-paper, “hopes the city will force the owners of the strip
clubs to sell their businesses or move elsewhere if the Mid-Market
corridor becomes a redevelopment project area in September.”
At present, the dignified green façade of 1047
Market nestles cheek-to-jowl with the bright red marquee of the
Market Street Cinema next door, in what seems a fitting
recapitulation of San Francisco’s past. Better a bustling bawdy
neighbor than empty elegance.
Singing the corporation blues. Has
anyone connected the dots between this weekend’s FTAA protests in
Quebec and public opposition to the San Francisco’s proposed tax
settlement? Observers in Canada worry that the American heads of
state meeting there are giving away the civic store to large
corporations. People closer to home, who have feared a similar fate
for their city for several years, must see the tax payout as a
sellout, an incontrovertible symbol that the deal has already been
done.
Perhaps that’s what the Mission
Anti-Displacement Coalition, Just Act, and the Coalition to Stop the
Free Trade Area of the Americas had in mind when they scheduled a
“march against eviction profiteers and global displacement” for
Friday, April 20. The motley crew, and other interested parties,
will gather at 3:30 at Powell & Market, and walk to a
celebration at Portsmouth Square. (415 553-3418 or 415 504-8254.41
gets you more information.)
The line forms here. City
Attorney Louise Renne, whose fingers have trailed through a number
of tasty pies recently, stands to face a number of worthy opponents
this fall. Neil Eisenberg, now busily mustering the municipal
utility district troops, has mentioned the possibility of mounting
the hustings. More positive is lawyer Stephen Williams, recently
visible and vocal in opposition to a 122-foot-tall office building
at Powell & O’Farrell. Williams is already talking like a
candidate: “Yes, I am running for city attorney. I am tired of
fighting the city on every issue and believe we can do much better
to have someone on the inside that is not beholden to the special
interests. It is more than time for a change.” Renne will
undoubtedly run on her record, which her official
biography notes includes cultivating “the city attorney’s
role in improving the city's business acumen.”
Betsey Culp
