Kim’s clean-streets campaign vow draws both praise and skepticism
It’s Monday morning, and Omar Dejesus is scrubbing the windows of the Shiekh shoe store on Market Street, gingerly avoiding a brackish stain on the sidewalk.
“This street gets pretty bad,” said Dejesus, who manages the store on San Francisco’s main downtown artery, a shopping corridor littered with cigarette butts, used needles and the occasional pile of excrement.
Supervisor Jane Kim, whose district includes Mid-Market, is now pressing legislation that she says will help fix the problem: a request for $2.5 million outside the normal budget process to fund citywide street cleaning. It goes before the board’s Budget and Finance Subcommittee on Thursday.
Kim, who in the past has drawn criticism for allowing homeless encampments to linger and garbage to pile up in her district, is now a leading progressive contender in the mayor’s race. And she’s made street cleaning a centerpiece of her platform.
To that end, Kim’s campaign is running sponsored ads on Facebook and Twitter, asking voters to sign a petition supporting the “San Francisco Loves Clean Streets” plan. If
elected mayor, Kim has pledged to double the number of street cleaners throughout the city, double the number of public restrooms in certain problem areas, and partner with nonprofits and Community Benefit Districts to hire homeless people as street sweepers.
“This is an issue that animates people — and it should,” Kim said. “It’s visible. People are frustrated.”
Her plan is getting a mixed reaction among merchants and residents of District Six, the patchwork of condominium buildings, office towers and sprawling tent cities in the SoMa, Transbay District, MidMarket and Tenderloin neighborhoods that Kim has represented since 2011.
Some merchants and residents welcome the effort, saying it’s long overdue. Others call it grandstanding by a politician who needs to reach beyond her progressive base if she wants to win a citywide race. Still others have no comment on Kim’s political motivations, but wonder why it took so long for her to address execrable street conditions.
“I’ve been here for 29 years and I haven’t seen any change,” said Alex Hanna, manager of Oxford Street, a designer menswear shop on mid-Market Street. He said he hoses off the sidewalk every morning when he arrives for work.
Reports from the City Controller’s Office show that from the time Kim took office in 2011, her district has consistently ranked among the filthiest in the city. In 2014 the city’s Public Works Department labeled Market Street between Seventh Street and 11th Street its dirtiest commercial roadway, citing an abundance of food wrappings, feces and plastic bags.
In 2015, District Six generated more complaints about human waste, needles and broken glass than any other district in the city, a problem that only worsened the following year. The amount of human waste reports was particularly notable. Public Works received 5,811 calls to clean up feces from District Six sidewalks in 2015, a number that spiked to 7,509 in 2016. District Nine — the Mission — trailed far behind in second place, with 1,909 complaints in 2015 and 2,621 in 2016.
“The sidewalks here are terrible,” said August Lopez, a security guard at a pediatric clinic on Ellis Street in the Tenderloin. He applauded Kim for tackling what seems like an insurmountable problem.
“I’m all for Jane Kim,” Lopez said.
Kim acknowledged that excrement and trash are a scourge in her district and said the data validates her budget request.
She said she began pushing last fall, following reports of a hepatitis A outbreak among homeless people in San Diego, which made national news headlines and became a cautionary tale for San Francisco.
“We realized this isn’t just unsightly, it’s a public health issue,” she said.
The supervisor also defended her record, noting that in 2014 she installed Pit Stops, portable toilets with receptacles for used needles and bins for dog waste, in the Tenderloin.
Yet, clean streets were never Kim’s priority. When she ran for state Senate in 2016, she attacked her opponent, Scott Wiener, for supporting Mayor Ed Lee’s sweep of a sprawling and squalid homeless camp on Division Street.
Wiener won the race, and he and Kim have remained rivals. He was stunned by her “San Francisco Loves Clean Streets” slogan. He particularly takes offense to her social media ads in the mayor’s race, some of which feature pictures of the Castro — a neighborhood he represented as supervisor — instead of Kim’s District Six.
“For the entire six years that we served together on the Board of Supervisors, I fought every year to get more cleaning crews in the budget,” Wiener said. “She never supported my efforts. At times she was oppositional.”
He added: “You know what? If she’s found religion and now believes in clean streets, the more the merrier. But it just doesn’t jibe with her past actions.”
Mayor Mark Farrell agrees that the city’s street cleaning budget should be increased. But he and the city’s budget director, Melissa Whitehouse, have asked that it be incorporated into the budget that Farrell will roll out in May.
Some city officials also pointed out that the $2.5 million supplement would have little impact on Public Works, which already has a $355 million annual budget. It expands every year.
“Street cleaning remains a top priority of mine and will be addressed in the upcoming budget I submit to the Board of Supervisors,” Farrell said Tuesday. “The budget process is the appropriate forum for discussions on what we should be spending on street cleaning — not a budget supplemental.”
Kim recoiled at that idea, saying the need for street cleaners is so urgent that it should be addressed both ways — by Farrell, and via a request for supplemental funds from a supervisor. Such requests are called “supplemental appropriations” because they target funding that hasn’t been approved in the city budget.
“I want to do both,” Kim said, indicating that she would call for additional street cleaning money during budget negotiations.
Hanna, the menswear store manager who washes the sidewalk daily, was wary. If the city wants to beef up its public works funding, then “I should get a check,” he said.
Kim was sympathetic. “Well,” she said, “that’s an idea.”