With President Donald Trump in office, an LGBT historic site in San Francisco has dropped its request to become a National Historic Landmark, the Bay Area Reporter has learned.

The leadership of the Women’s Building in the city’s Mission district had been working with Donna Graves, a public historian based in Berkeley, to fill out the paperwork for the structure to secure a landmark designation, one of the highest honors at the federal level a property can receive outside of being named a national monument or park site.

Graves had secured a grant from the National Park Service’s LGBTQ Heritage Initiative, which earmarked funding specifically for LGBT historic nominations, as the B.A.R. first reported in March. The Women’s Building was founded in 1971 by a group of women that included a number of lesbian leaders.

read the full article  in the Bay Area Reporter

 

MEDIAN PARKING ON DOLORES AND GUERRERO HAS ALWAYS BEEN ILLEGAL, but the SF Metropolitan Transit Authority (SFMTA), which is in charge of parking regulation and enforcement, has looked the other way for decades. While the official word is that this practice has been tolerated to accommodate the neighborhood’s faith-based organizations, in reality, the vast majority of parkers in recent years are there not to attend services, but to avail themselves of Dolores Park and other local amenities. The parking is a great convenience for many but a source of considerable unhappiness among most local residents. As the Mission Dolores Neighborhood has become increasingly popular, so have the traffic congestion and safety issues associated with turning these two-lane thoroughfares into a single-lane gauntlet.

Last year, SFMTA convened a 9-member “Median Parking Advisory Committee” composed of local residents, business owners, and members of local religious organizations, in an attempt to arrive at some concensus about this contentious issue. After meeting for over 9 months, the Committee came up with a narrow but final recommendation to abolish all median parking (Note: SFMTA claims that no such consensus was reached due to a technical quorum issue). The agency  also did a survey of some 3,766 locals. 74% of respondents said they were either “completely (64.9%) or somewhat (10.8%) unsupportive of median parking conditions.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On August 14, SFMTA’s Board of Directors met to come to a final decision. While the results of the survey appeared unambiguous, the Board concluded: “the survey is neither the determining factor in the SFMTA’s final decision on median parking nor a statistically significant random sample of the stakeholders.”

Instead, SFMTA decided on a 12-month pilot program that would keep things pretty much as they are now, but would provide more enforcement against clearly unsafe practices based on yet-to-be-determined guidelines. (To date, there is no evidence that enforcement has changed in any way. As the photo attests, cars parked long after dark are not being ticketed on any regular basis.

Stay tuned for further developments.

LAST YEAR, THE SF MUNICIPAL TRANSIT AUTHORITY (SFMTA), convened a Median Parking Advisory Committee composed of nine local residents and members of local religious organizations with a stake in parking to help craft a formal policy regarding the contentious issue of median parking on Dolores St. and  Guerrero St. Although parking on medians is and always has been illegal, SFMTA has bowed to local religious organizations in the area for decades by looking the other way to median parking on Sundays (and to a lesser extent on Saturdays). This has led to a great many others who come for other purposes to park on the median as well, leading to a situation that many have called “out of control.”

SFMTA also conducted a community survey, completed by more than 3,700 residents, to get the pulse of the community as a whole. The survey found that about three-fourths of respondents were unhappy with the status quo, and favored doing away with median parking (see this article in Mission Local for more details on the survey). The advisory committee, after meeting for more than nine months, made a final recommendation to curtail median parking, coming to these conclusions:

1. Reducing two-lane transit corridors to just one lane has led to major congestion bottlenecks and pedestrian hazards.
2.  SFMTA’s failure to enforce perpendicular and intersection parking by median parkers has led to much abuse of the parking privilege and serious impediments to emergency vehicles in the event of an emergency.
3. It is unconstitutional to give preference in the use of a public asset (parking) to one group over another. If median parking on Guerrero were to be “formalized” to accommodate local churches, the City would be open to a lawsuit by a disgruntled citizen.
4. Median parking is incompatible with the recent greening of the Guerrero median. Unless median parking is carefully controlled by monitors, people  exiting and returning to their cars will trample the median plantings or damage them when opening their car door.
5. The reality is that most Sunday users of median parking on Dolores St. are not going to church, but to go to Dolores Park or to hang out in the neighborhood. For them, median parking is a convenience, not a necessity.

The final decision is now in the hands of the  SFMTA Board of Directors. Its next meeting is Tuesday, August 16 at 1 pm at City Hall, Room 400. If you wish to testify on this matter—pro, con, or in between—you are encouraged to attend. The Board will make its decision at the end of the meeting, and it’s more than likely that some compromise will be made, rather than an outright ban.