Homeless
Potrero Hill residents Jennine Jacob and Stacey Randecker Bartlett, along with other San Franciscans angry about encampments in their neighborhoods, pitched tents last month in Civic Center Plaza. The protest followed an incident in which Jacob took her three-year-old son to Franklin Square playground and found a homeless man sleeping in the sandbox; at Jackson Square Playground they encountered another homeless individual sitting on the children’s play structure. On another walk with her son, Jacob saw sex acts being exchanged for money in an open tent. She regularly sees drug deals. “There’s no way to go to get to Point A to Point B without passing some terrible situation,” said Jacob, who owns Mrs. Peasy, which rents party supplies. “It’s so sad to see people living that way and how we tolerate it in this City.” “You have to mobilize,” Randecker Bartlett said. “A tent is not a permanent home. You can’t have a job living in the tent.”
Play
Playground has launched its renovation of the Thick House theater, installing new air conditioning, lighting, seating, and signage. Donations of $2,000 or more to the remodel will be acknowledged with a naming of a new seat. In the meantime, the company is working out the kinks of The Potrero Nuevo Project, a set of six micro-plays that focus on aspects of Potrero Hill, including the decimation of its original inhabitants – the Ohlone Tribe – De Haro’s murder, and the past and present emergence of tent cities. Though the project takes on serious topics, it’s funnier than it sounds…
Move
The Potrero Hill Neighborhood House recently received $25,000 in matching funds from Kaiser Permanente to help pay to replace windows and asbestos shingles on the gym’s eastern side, as well as termite damage to the building housing the preschool. Piper Software is now leasing the facility’s southeast wing, and is offering a free afterschool program in electronics and programming…The Center for Biological Diversity, Coalition for Clean Air, Communities for a Better Environment and the Sunset Coalition filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of those opposed to the Golden State Warriors’ proposed 18,000-seat Mission Bay arena. The groups asked the First District Court of Appeal to find that the City’s review of the project failed to quantify and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions or inform the public about cancer-causing toxic air contaminants. They also contend that the City’s 2015 environmental impact report violates the California Environmental Quality Act.
Money
Therapist Karen Erlichman, who was profiled in the July View, may have to leave Potrero Hill in the wake of the sale of her Connecticut Street building when her lease ends at the end of the year. Another sign of the times; what will San Francisco be when shrinks can no longer afford to be here?
