Category: Life in San Francisco

Posted on

How Safe is San Francisco?

Where would you expect to find more criminal acts committed…the Sunset District or Hunter’s Point? The answer…the Sunset District with a ratio of 123 criminal acts to Hunter’s Point’s 18.  Now granted, the Sunset is the largest district being cut into the inner, central and outer Sunset, but still. I’ve always remarked how quiet it was here.

Where did I get this information? There’s a website called Trulia.com that gives people in the market for a house information on the houses available and the neighborhoods surrounding them. Now they’ve added a crime map to map where the crimes are occurring and what type of crimes they are. The worst part about this is when you move around and compare other cities on their list to San Francisco, we top the list as the highest crime city overall. We’re higher than bigger cities like Los Angeles and Chicago in overall crimes which was a pretty big shock to me. At least in the Sunset they’re usually indecent exposure and public intoxication with the occasional car break in or theft. We’re basically drunks and pervs out here for the most part.

The majority of crimes occur in the mid-market area from Civic Center down to 6th street followed by a line down Mission Street and oddly enough there’s a hot spot around North Beach/Chinatown. This is shown on their heat map where you’ll see blotches of red to indicate a higher amount of criminal activity. The total number of crimes for the last month in San Francisco was 2500. By comparison, Chicago had 818 and Los Angeles had 1504. These are two huge cities covering more miles than San Francisco, yet they have less crime than we do. New Orleans came closest to us with 2471 and they beat us in violent crimes.

My question to all this local crime is what gives Mayor Lee? There is talk of cutting back the police force in the city to ease the budget, but when San Francisco tops the list in overall crime [note, I couldn’t compare NYC as they aren’t on the lists.] This might make the crime rates go up and we’re already on top. This city needs to do something about the crime or else not only are we going to start losing residents, but we’ll start losing tourist dollars as well. I can’t say how accurate this is, but it is set up by geocaching reported crimes, so that counts for something in the overall equation.

Be safe and have a nice weekend now.

[ad#AdBrite]

DTFQSV4K7KW9 ignore: For Technorati purposes only.

Posted on

The Second California Gold Rush Hits San Francisco

Back in the 1800’s when James Marshall found a chunk of gold at Sutter’s Mill California it started a wave of people who wanted to get rich quick flooding into the state to make their millions. Sound a bit familiar?

San Francisco was the landing place for a lot of the people who were heading out to get rich during the Gold Rush. We were a big port that had lots of food and supplies for the get rich quick people and because the demand was so high we could raise the price. San Franciscan’s back then didn’t have to head to the hills to get rich. They could do it by sitting on their butts selling goods to the newcomers at inflated rates.

Well since then things haven’t changed too much. I realized this while talking to a friend of mine who came here about 18 years ago from Italy following another gold rush — the gold rush of Silicon Valley. This time the gold rush was a little different. He was a computer programmer and was lured here by an offer of big money. Sure, you had to work long hours to get it, but it was big money and he was single like many of the original people to gold rush. There difference was that he was coming here to be handed the money. It was guaranteed up front for at least a significant amount of time all due to venture capital.

Like many of the gold rush people of the 1800’s he came to San Francisco first and then he slowly moved on to parts outside the city. Luckily he didn’t have to go far up into the Northern hills, but only had to move a little bit south to Brisbane. Brisbane is nice town. It has an old city feel to it which is a funny contrast to the eastern side of town which is all high rise office buildings gleaming in the sunlight. These campuses [or should that be campi?] bring in tech workers from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. You  notice that we call it the San Francisco Bay Area right? While not the most populous city in the Bay Area, it’s the best known. I know people who live in Alameda, or San Bruno who tell people they live in San Francisco because it’s easier for people to identify the location if they don’t live here.

San Francisco has many tech companies such as Adobe, Yelp, Square and Twitter that help keep us on the tech map. The problem is how to keep them here. Our minimum wage is higher which isn’t too much of a problem for tech workers, but our costs are higher. Rent is high here and the City of San Francisco is one of the few cities that tax employers. Things like this make the people who come from San Francisco leave San Francisco if they want to start a company. This is also another reason why housing rental is so high. We have a high turnover rate in rentals which gives the owners incentive to raise rates when people leave. Remember what I said earlier about how we sold goods at an inflated price during the first gold rush? The same is true today. We’ll still keep people coming, but we may not keep them here for more than a few years unless we take a look at how we deal with the people and the businesses in our city.

[ad#AdBrite]

Posted on

Donations gladly accepted

Thank you for taking a moment from your day to help us out by reading this. As many of you know I currently am freelancing while writing my blog. I do not have a full time job and not much income.  I appreciate your reading the articles on the site and really appreciate your donations. If you like what you have been reading and wish to see it continue then please donate. I have four options for donations at this time. See below for details:

  1. Recurring donation: If you select this you will be charged via paypal $1/$5/$10 per month until you send us an email cancelling your donation.
    Monthly Donation

     

  2. One time donation: If you select this you will be given the option to donate any amount you wish via paypal without a recurring charge.

We would like to thank you for making a donation to the website so that I can keep making the site better and better as well as helping to provide for us and our daughter, who is autistic and while she is receiving help from the school district there are other services we would like to provide her with, such as speech therapy which which we simply cannot afford at this time.

Anyone who donates $25 or more or selects the $5/month subscription* will automatically receive a free autographed copy of my CD, I’ve got a guitar and I’m not afraid to use it!

*You must subscribe for at least 6 months to be eligible for this offer.

 

Posted on

Grizzly Bears? In Golden Gate Park?

Today’s column comes from The Western Neighborhoods Project, run by Woody LaBounty. Woody has collected a group of people who remember the old days from their own stories and ones that have been passed down to them by relatives. I’m trying to dig through my archives of stuff my Mom used to tell me about how the city had changed from when she was a kid. I’m glad her vision was going because she’d probably not like today. So here’s another one from the Good Ole days file.
Golden Gate Park Children’s Playground 

Golden Gate Park Children's Playgroundby Pat French Swendsen

(Originally published in theRichmond Review andSunset Beacon,January 2002)

Yes, there were grizzly bears in Golden Gate Park, near the Children’s Playground.

Far from the benign setting of swings and sand boxes, the bears roamed gloomily in a sunken, almost underground, alleyway near smelly, dank dens where the bears lived.

Before they were removed from the park, the giants of the wild were confined in this cavernous layout as people peered down on the bears from above, standing on strong iron bars.

The playground at that time contained a wonderful corkscrew metal slide. It had nice architectural touches, including stairs that looked like fancy furnace floor vents. Sometimes on hot, sunny days the slide would get very hot, but that was never a problem—the trip down was always swift.

There were also elephants in the park. Children could ride in a seat on the elephant’s back along a designated path: two rides for a nickel. I never found out where the elephants went at night or where they came from (retired from a circus?), but it was an exotic ride that for a few moments transported us to India, where we felt important and powerful.

One of my fondest memories of the Children’s Playground was getting into a scooter that would go down a concrete path from the top of a nearby hill to the bottom. An eager young man always started our journey at the top when we were securely seated in the Kiddie Car. When riding in the cars, the “clickity clack” of the wheels could be heard as we sped along. It was marvelous.

The nearby merry-go-round was a whole other scene, with its mirrored panels and glockenspiel sounds coming from a loud music box. At the end of a ride, there would be a rush of kids coming to grab their favorite animals for the next ride.

Sometimes we barely had three seconds to get off the animal before someone else was trying to get on. For many children, a dream ride was on the line.

Everyone had their favorite rides on the carousel—the giraffes were wonderfully high but didn’t move and the chariots where mothers sat with their toddlers were a choice of last resort.

The swings at the old playground were different than today, with the seats of the swings being made of heavy wooden rectangles that gave many a youth a bloody nose for standing too close. Other features at the park included steel ladders that were mounted horizontally so we could swing on them rung-to-rung.

That was a long time ago, but I still have many fond, poignant memories.

[ad#AdBrite]

Posted on

Change Can Be Good

It appears that everyone is up in arms at the moment over the Stow Lake Boathouse. I’ve been thinking about this for awhile and whether you like it or not…here are my thoughts on it.

Currently we have a family called the McLellan Corporation [that rarely uses that name because it makes them sound less, well family-ish] who has run the boathouse for over 67 years that is in the midst of being pushed out by a group from New Mexico called the Ortega Family that runs spots at Carlsbad Caverns and Muir Woods. The funny part is that most of the attention is that people who aren’t from here shouldn’t be running something in San Francisco. Think about that for a second. How many people who run stuff in San Francisco are from here in the first place?

If the San Francisco mayor had to be born in San Francisco just like the President of the United States has to be born in the US then I would be one of the few candidates for Mayor. I think I would be running against Eric Mar and Ron Dudum. San Francisco has always been a cultural melting pot of people from other places coming here to mix it up with people from other places. The It’s-it is a San Francisco tradition that’s now made in San Bruno and the video on their site on it’s history is with an executive of the company who is East Indian. Not a caucasian man in Victorian dress with a handle bar moustache and mutton chop sideburns.

But I digress a bit. Let’s get back to the boathouse. It needs a major make over. It looks the same as it did when I was eight and that was forty years ago. Actually, it kind of looks worse because I’m not sure if it’s been painted since then. The soda that you buy there is still the watery semi-flat syrup and co2 injected water. The hot dogs are just as tasteless as back then and in general the food they offer isn’t very healthy. The McLellan family could have changed the menu over the years to include more healthy locally produced food, but they didn’t.

The argument seems to be San Francisco wants healthy fare vs. we’ve owned it for so long we’re a San Francisco legacy. That strikes me as a form of racketeering. We’ve owned it longer so we should get to continue to serve garbage to the fine citizens of San Francisco. That doesn’t fly well with me. San Franciscan’s don’t seem to like change except when it comes to upgraded public restrooms. I on the other hand enjoy when things get an upgrade. The Beach Chalet used to be a dive bar that only the die hard drunks would go to and now it’s a huge gathering place for people and their kids. When my family and I go to Stow Lake now the last place we think of going is the boathouse.

I do believe the Ortega family who’s done a good job in Muir Woods would do great at the Stow Lake Boathouse because they’re listening to what the people of San Francisco want. The days of a walk in the park and eating carnival crap are gone. This is San Francisco and you can’t have a LEED certified build [the Academy of Sciences] less than half a mile away that everyone’s using as a sign that we’re number one and you’re serving up high fructose, saturated fat wielding, red dye no.2 garbage. The McLellan’s could have changed that, but they didn’t. Some people are arguing that an out of town company wouldn’t use local, healthy products. I doubt that. Any company looks at it’s bottom line and it would be far more expensive to ship in healthy foods than to get them locally. San Franciscan’s hate change, but love it after they see the change happen. I just prefer to sit on the cutting edge and see it before it happens.

[gmap width=”650px” height=”200px” type=”satellite” visible=”true” static=”true” zoom=”16″ lat=”37.7749295″ lon=”-122.41941550000001″]

[ad#AdBrite]

Posted on

Sunset Boulevard’s Bureaucratic Medians

I just finished reading an article today in the West Portal Monthly about the medians on Sunset Boulevard. I knew something was up because I’ve noticed they’ve been tearing them up recently. Not all of them, but only a six block area of them. This got me wondering when I saw the new turf laid down and wondered how much that cost the taxpayers.

Now I have to admit that the median has been nothing but weeds for years with a few bits of grass thrown in so in some ways I’m happy to see it replanted but at what cost? $1.2 million dollars is the cost and why are we spending this much? Well apparently our supervisor Carmen Chu got the idea that it would be good to replace the 25 year system and install a new more water efficient for of grass called bentgrass. It says it uses about half the water of the previous weeds grass so I had to look into this new fangled grass.

Apparently, bentgrass is mostly used on golf course putting greens, lawn bowling and lawn tennis courts so that already sounds like it’s a kind of luxury grass. Here’s the kicker on what the demands are for growing this grass according to University of California’s Integrated Pest Management Program: High maintenance. Creeping bentgrass requires frequent watering, mowing, aerating, and dethatching, and high levels of fertilizer.

Oops! Little mistake there. The article goes on to state that this new grass and the low flow watering system will save seven million gallons a year which could serve 120 single family homes in the Sunset. There’s a little hitch to this problem. That’s all reclaimed water. The only thing it’s good for is watering your lawn and maybe washing your car. Reclaimed water is filtered sewer water with some of the impurities removed. It is not fit for human consumption in any way shape or form, so it’s not saving water for human consumption one bit.

I’ve driven by the medians that have been finished and I’ve seen the sprinklers popping up. Because it’s new turf you have to water it more at first. These look just like the sprinklers we installed in our lawn. There’s nothing really specials about this that makes them anymore water efficient than mine, but they’ve got a lot more of them. They’re about one foot apart and these are still not too cheap.

The next phases of this is to reinstall new turf on either side of Sunset Boulevard. First the east side, then the west side. I’m not sure what that’s going to do to all the new trees they planted around the area recently, but I expect that some of them might be injured if they don’t carefully remove them or use smaller tillers to dig up the soil. What’s even more baffling is that some of those big trees there are very old and have some big root structures that have been tearing up the boulevard causing bumps  in the far right lanes in places.

Now it’s time for what would Eric do? [WWED?], well they should have pulled out the grass altogether and planted some of those nice aeoniums and other succulent like plants that we found grow if we water them and grow if we don’t. It would give us a very distinctive median that they’re doing in other parts of the city and it would take about five minutes of water every couple of weeks and a drive by once every month or so just to check if there was any overgrowth happening that needed to be trimmed back. Out across from Java Beach is a small little park that was built by the residents and it has lots of succulents planted that are just doing fine and it’s only watered by the rain. There are plenty of drought resistant plants that would have been a much better and cost effective choice, plus they clone very easily.

The other thing I question is why the other nine blocks of the boulevard are being left as is? Were there fewer donators to Carmen Chu’s campaign living north of Sunset and Rivera? If they had done it my way they could have saved money and done the entire boulevard and the extra water could be used in Golden Gater Park to make that as spectacular as it used to be.

[gmap width=”650px” height=”200px” type=”satellite” visible=”true” static=”true” zoom=”16″ lat=”37.7459539″ lon=”-122.49461819999999″]

[ad#AdBrite]

Posted on

BART vs. Muni

Last Friday I had to meet up with a friend I’m doing some freelance work for and I had to meet her in Oakland. As you know I have a hatred for the Bay Bridge, so I suggested that if we could meet somewhere near a BART station that would work out best for me. She found a coffee shop right next to the Rockridge BART station so we had a date.

Now it’s been close to 10 years since I’ve taken a trip on BART and it was hard to remember what it was like back then. Well, 10 years ago is a long time these days. I hopped on MUNI and rode it down to Embarcadero and went up and then back down to BART. The first thing I noticed was that there were fewer people waiting for BART. The MUNI had been jammed up all the way down to Embarcadero with people who were more likely to push and shove to get their way around. BART was a whole different story.

First off, MUNI has cold hard seats that encourage you to spend as little time on it as possible. BART had nice cushioned, comfy seats that while being stained a bit and dirty wasn’t so bad. There was also lots of room on BART and less people. I do remember many years ago when I had to use BART during rush hour to travel to a rehearsal space in Oakland that was fairly uncomfortable, but nothing near what it was during rush hour in the city.

So as I’m sitting down in my comfy chair and we speed off into the transbay tunnel the first thing I noticed was that we were going fast. Then I noticed it was kind of loud. I pulled out my iPhone to run my decibel meter to find out that the average noise level was 95db with a peak of 105db. That’s louder than MUNI, but then I noticed something I never noticed on MUNI. I had 5 bars of service underwater and free WiFi access. WTF? Why doesn’t San Francisco have this? There was a guy sitting across from me who was happily surfing the web and going work on his laptop while we were cruising along just like me on my iPhone. I kind of wished I had the iPad with me as it would have been enjoyable to watch a TV show while I was cruising along.

It turns out that to watch a half hour TV show I would have had to travel almost to Pittsburgh to get the whole show in. BART is fast. It also uses the Clipper card now so I didn’t have to buy an extra ticket enroute that I would probably never use within the next 10 years. All in all, it was a nice fast trip. In the BART station the announcements were in a very well spoken, understandable English and the stations overall just seemed cleaner. There were signs that told you which stops to get off at for the various destinations around the Bay which was a nice addition as I didn’t realize how easy it was to get to places outside of San Francisco. Now if they could only find a way to put a station near IKEA and the shopping centers next to it we would travel across the bay far more often. I think I may have found an alternative to the hell of the Bay Bridge, I just need to see what’s around the stations for me to visit.

[ad#AdBrite]

Posted on

Owning a Home in San Francisco

There’s been lots of articles in the paper recently about owning a home being a bad thing. I was always scratching my head about this until I realized I’m one of the few people left that was born and raised in San Francisco and is STILL HERE. Most of the people you’ll find in San Francisco are lucky to have lived here for twenty years at most, so it’s time I gave you a little history lesson about San Francisco real estate.

Now for most people here they don’t remember the time when a house was affordable because they aren’t, well, old like me. I was born in 1962 and my parents had bought their four bedroom house in the Sunset in 1954 for a whopping $18,300. Yes, you saw that right, there isn’t a couple of extra zeros on that number. The builders, McKewan Construction were asking $23,500 and my parents underbid the asking price and got it. The early 50’s was a buyer’s market.

My parents never thought of selling the house and moving on. It was a home to them and you didn’t sell it every couple of years to turn a profit only to move into a bigger home that you’d again turn and sell at a profit a few years later again.

My Grandmother was always the business savvy one in the family and she consulted her lawyer who worked out a deal that because I was living in the house when I turned 18 that I could have my name added on the the title as an owner so that when everyone was gone there would be no inheritance. Smart move and if you have kids you should think about doing this. There’s nothing illegal about it and it gives your kids a pretty priceless place to live in California what with Prop 13 and all that.

Now housing prices rose a bit over the years, but it wasn’t until around the late 80’s that the prices started to soar. In the 70’s you could get the same house for around $50,000. That’s pretty much close to the cost of a Lexus today with add ons and closing costs. Somewhere around the mid 80’s the prices started to skyrocket. When my wife and I got married you could get a two bedroom for around $215,000 out in the Sunset. I know, we were looking into the idea at the time. Our first landlord got a two bedroom house with a 1 bedroom cottage house in 1994 for $205,000. It wasn’t a fixer upper either.

Prices kept going up and right before the dot bomb of 2000 my Mom’s best friend who was in real estate told us we could easily get $1.5 million for this house. Great, we were millionaire, but still trying to struggle to pay the bills. I remember having to write the check for my Mom for the property tax that year and it was $650. We were paying twice that for our two bedroom house we were renting at the time.

My friends from High School, the few that stayed around and ended up in a similar situation to myself are all doing pretty good. I’m happy for them. We had parents that thought ahead. Others can’t fathom this and the fact that the people writing for the Chronicle and Examiner never take this into account shows that they aren’t either. Probably because they weren’t born and raised here. There are lots of people who want to do away with Prop 13 so that the state can get more money from home owners, but I’m not going to stand with that group. I plan on dying in this home, probably not literally, but I want to pass this house on to our daughter when we go.

I used to hate the crotchety old guys who would sit out in front of their houses in a lounge chair watering their lawns talking about why, I remember back when we… fill in the snide comment of your choice. I want to be that guy when I’m in my 70’s. I guess it’s all because I’m a Sunset redneck at heart and I want to be around to remind people about that.

[ad#AdBrite]

Posted on

Muni Noise

I was on the Muni metro the other day and happened to run out of things to do with my iPhone while traveling to my destination. I happened to remember that I had a decibel meter on my iPhone and decided to run it because the street car seemed a bit loud. I was pretty surprised at what it told me.  It peaked at 105db and averaged between 90-95db. What does this all mean? Read on and find out.

A normal conversation takes place at about 70db. A loud rock concert can be at 110-120db. Anything over 85db is bad for your hearing in long bursts. Once you pass 85db you’ll start to develop hearing damage after 30 minutes. Pass 100db and in five minutes you’ll start to develop damage.

I luckily have a set of earplugs that reduce the noise by 60db and they’re reusable. I used to be the guy at rock concerts that was uncool because I wore earplugs. When I was managing the band Warfare D.C. we used to sell earplugs so that the people coming to the show and the musicians in the bands didn’t have to go deaf when performing.

I remember getting jeered at in the beginning, but some of the people didn’t like leaving the clubs with their ears ringing and started to purchase the earplugs. They were a foam type that you could throw away afterwards and selling them gave us a bit of an edge because it was one of the few ways to make extra money by selling everyone a disposable item for under a buck.

I never thought that the street cars would be so loud and now I might set up shop outside West Portal station or perhaps down at Embarcadero or Montgomery stations selling the ear plugs. Our transit system shouldn’t be so noisy, but it is. While I had thought about noise at concerts I never thought about noise in every day life and it’s pretty astounding.

If you go to work everyday on the streetcars like most people do, you’re exposing yourself to noise pollution of a high magnitude. When I was in a band and rehearsing we used to get the local police knocking on the door telling us that we were emitting greater than 75db from my house where we rehearsed and had to stop. I never thought about that, but essentially they were saying we were having a loud conversation that other people could hear. We weren’t necessarily endangering people’s ears outside the house, but the law is the law. I’m sure we were putting out more than 75db from the house, but the law is also sometimes leaning toward the neighbors of a nice quiet neighborhood. I suppose that’s why most rehearsal studios tend to be in industrial not residential areas.

I’m hoping that some of the San Francisco Supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee will read this and think about it. We don’t want a large majority of San Franciscans saying, what was that you said when they hit their 40’s. I’ve been so good with my protecting my ears from a young age that I can’t have my cell phone more than halfway up when I have the ringtone turned on because it seems too loud. My wife is taking a shower right behind me with a wall separating us and it seems loud to me yet only registers at about 55db. I hear the humming of the fans and electronic equipment like our refrigerator that most people never hear. When we get hit with the occasional black out everyone I know says it sounds weird and that’s because they can’t hear the 60hz hum of the power lines like I can.

I have become what people in the recording industry refer to as a GEB [golden eared bastard] because I can hear things other people can’t. It’s a bit of a blessing and curse at the same time, but I highly suggest if you work downtown or have to take public transportation on a regular basis that you try wearing earplugs for a month and see if you don’t start to hear better. Better yet, if you have a smart phone download a decibel meter app. I got mine for 99¢ test it everywhere. Trust me you’ll be surprised.

[ad#AdBrite]

Posted on

Sea Lions Back at the S.F. Zoo

I have to give thanks to two of my friends Beth Wise and Lincoln Shaw who work at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. I follow their posts to facebook about the work they do and when I heard about a sea lion they called Silent Knight I was happy. Not so much for the sea lion as it had been shot in the face with a shotgun and was now blind, but I was happy that they got to care for him and bring him back around.

Sea lions tend to not be bothered by people so they tend to act rather friendly towards us. Then some idiot has to pull out a shot gun and shoot at them to get them to move away from them. While that sounds like a good idea in some parts of San Francisco, it’s not a good idea when it comes to marine mammals.

I’ve had a love of seals, sea lions and all other marine mammals from a young age. I remember taking a class at the now defunct Junior Academy at the California Academy of Sciences and we had a field trip down to Año Nuevo Beach where the elephant seals come to breed. I remember jumping over a log with the rest of the people in the class only to turn around after and realize it wasn’t a log, but an elephant seal. These are pretty impressive and intelligent creatures and many of them moved from Seal Rock out near me to Pier 39 now where they put on a show for the onlookers and manage to stink up the place a bit due to their diet of oily fish which makes their poop smell a bit on the unbearable side.

Sea lions have always been the Marx Brothers of the pinniped world used in movies because of their humorous antics that mimicked human behavior if people had finds instead of hands and feet. They can adapt to living in these confined conditions, but they aren’t their happiest when they have to. This is part of the reason I’m glad that Silent Knight has been moved to the San Francisco Zoo. While he’s recovered from the shotgun blast, he’s still blind and can’t be released into the wild like the Marine Mammal Center normally does. The San Francisco Zoo stepped in and offered to care for him so he can live out his years with support and care from people who know how to take care of animals.

The Marine Mammal Center volunteers have a job that isn’t the best and they don’t get paid. Imagine going to work and having to blend up lots of oily smelly fish that you then have to more or less force feed to a sick not very willing animal. You probably don’t come home smelling very good and on top of it there’s no pay, no benefits other than knowing in your heart that you’ve helped an injured animal.

So cheers to Beth and Lincoln and all the other hard working people at the MMC. Maybe I need to get all the other members of my old band together and take up a collection to donation to one of their residents named Black Wolf [my band was named Black Wülf, note the umlat and U to make it look even more metal.]

[ad#AdBrite]