An Open Letter to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee

Dear Mr. Mayor:

Last week, my sweet, genteel wife was assaulted by what she suspected was a homeless person. She was hit on the head as she bent over to kiss our eight month old son while standing on Mission near Van Ness. She now suffers a concussion and is resting, and I’m sure pondering our decision to raise a family in the city. This city has failed miserably on addressing issues of livability and quality of life, and has perpetuated a failed policing strategy that has not addressed the homeless impact on the community. As a former New Yorker, I can’t imagine former Mayor Bloomberg looking out over the plaza near City Hall, as I’m sure you do, to see the scores of homeless encampments, and not feel ashamed and a call to action. You are the Mayor of all, not just of the few special property or business interests. We need good, feasible solutions to our problems and some measurable progress upon their execution, not more politics.

As two year residents of SoMa, we’re left with great frustration and a quandry about this city’s priorities. Quality of life for all San Franciscans should be your primary responsibility, and we believe you’ve fallen short. Our city is an embarrassment – especially compared with my past homes in Los Angeles and New York city. What’s most disappointing is that the biggest factors that affect the safety of your constituents are easily solved.

Currently, we pay for these failed policy decisions everyday with higher policing, fire department and emergency room visit costs – costs that far exceed the cost of simply providing people the dignity of homes. I’m a social liberal and fiscal conservative, so this realization has not come easy for me. But I’m also a pragmatist and a data driven business person. You have no other option. As the city grows, you will begin to see stress and manifestations of schisms that one doesn’t see outside of the third world – gross disparities of wealth, with affluent families exiting their doors where people with no homes sleep on the sidewalks a few steps away. The good news is that you can reverse this trend and stay true to your primary base, as well as do something truly human.

Here are some simple ideas that I’m sure that your staff won’t find controversial.

1. Homes for the Homeless. Provide homes and services for the homeless outside of the core city area. Much has been written about other cities’ approach to the homeless, but there is one standout strategy: providing homes to the homeless. Oddly, “progressive” San Francisco has lagged behind cities like Salt Lake City, UT, and New York, NY. As these cities have found, San Francisco will actually spend significantly less than it does on health services, community costs, policing, etc… than it does on the homes it provides. Let’s pursue this strategy with conviction and good execution, rather than yet another self-congratulatory press release that simply kicks the proverbially can down the road.

2. Clean up BART Stations. BART is a poorly run system with bad reliability and filthy stations. Although some problems are due to aging equipment, most are largely due to a disinterested and poorly aligned workforce. Start requiring greater accountability of the employees in each station to maintain cleanliness and safety through measurable outcomes. We encountered a rare treat at the Embarcadero station yesterday with a worker named Wilson who genuinely took accountability for his station. He expressed frustration that the elevators are always pooled with urine, and the poor response of the cleaning crew.

3. Make Walking Safer. Cars running red lights and blocking the box have reached epic levels, as I’m sure you are aware. Dangerous drivers can be addressed with red light and blocking the box cameras. This will achieve three important objectives: 1) influence drivers to obey the law; 2) provide revenue to the city to use on important pedestrian safety and mass transit initiatives; and 3) overcome the lax enforcement of the SFPD and take the stress from discretionary, community policing. Politically, this will cost you nothing, as most drivers who will invariably complain about the expensive tickets are not your constituents, or are simply people who behave in a way that seriously jeopardizes the safety of families in a selfish interest to save seconds in their commute.

4. Align our Police with Community/Quality of Life Interests. Broken windows policing will, over time, significantly improve the quality of life for the community. Police should be in the community – outside of cars – walking and biking their beats. The SFPD also must re-prioritize its “emergency” and “non-emergency” categories to align with quality of life and cost effective policing – e.g., a motorcycle racing around a children’s playground inside of a park should be considered an urgent matter instead of a non-emergency. The SFPD are here to protect and serve all of its citizens, and that culture should be introduced and supported in a meaningful way.

5. Clean up Sidewalks. No amount of street sweeping will remove the level of filth of the city that exists due to a neglectful police policy. And it starts on the sidewalks. We hear street sweepers – sometimes one after another – several times a day. People and animals defecate on the sidewalk, doorways and stairwells. With proper community policing and addressing the homeless issue, this will ultimately go away. But until then, the city can start cleaning the sidewalks on a more regular basis or require businesses and homeowners to do it.

6. Parking enforcement. Cars park for days on our street and those adjacent, despite the fact that it’s limited to one hour during the day, and there is an unusual proliferation of handicapped tags on cars that can’t possibly be representative of the community. This is confusing to me, because if properly enforced, this is another revenue positive and behavior modification policy that is so simple to deploy.

My family is faced with the dilemma of staying in the city and working through the issues as the city becomes more gentrified, or moving to a community that presents a more competent and balanced civil service and elected official profile.

For too long, the city’s permissiveness has been at the expense of those of us who pay the taxes and ultimately build healthy, sustainable communities. Over time, if allowed, new development by the private sector will transform most neighborhoods for the better, but I’ll concede that it will be at the expense of diversity. That said, I’ll take the private sector over the poorly orchestrated and executed policies of elected officials. Our supervisor has been inexcusably nonresponsive, and we regard Jane Kim “not a factor of change” in the new San Francisco. We resent the early career politician who has proven no degree of ability or accomplishment as they move up the ranks of the civic payroll.

As the city grows, so will the relevance and importance of elected positions, and we are hopeful that it will bring out more dedicated and capable people who have proven accomplishment in their private sector careers. Please address the basic issues above and help San Francisco take it’s rightful place as a city that people are proud to call home.

We are hopeful that you will soon discover that the “right thing” and the “hard thing” is often the same thing, and that courage and leadership are attributes of people who truly want to build an equitable and secure society.