JAIME GUTIERREZ

A city is an ecosystem. There are families, individuals, businesses, and bureaucracies. When an imbalance exists we suffer. Today San Francisco is imbalanced as families, individuals and businesses are suffering.

We can revitalize District 9 together.

Valencia Street receives much attention with its failed bike lane, but MIssion Street has been doubly decimated by traffic control measures that discourage customers. Fentanyl is the next flavor of drug epidemic which brings crime, suffering, and death. Residents are unsafe from the realities that their safety may be compromised as in the home invasion on Siliman street or the recent automobile arsons in Bernal Heights. Visitors to the District would rather stay home and purchase online or go elsewhere which causes small businesses or families running these businesses to suffer since they lose customers.

The disruption to our District’s ecosystem is a failed bureaucracy and this District needs new leadership to bring balance back to our families and businesses by championing common sense policies that:

• Bring security

• Bring businesses more customers

• Provide direction and hope to the most under-resourced members of our community

Vote for me, and together we will revitalize our District 9 together and restore the balance which will counteract the suffering we are all feeling as a community.

People need to be safe.

This is more than feeling safe. Today, the bureaucracy has encouraged the SFPD to be understaffed. This has led to much longer response times and biased choices on where to respond first. The Portola neighborhood currently suffers an unnecessary amount of crime as they reside on the outer boundaries of Ingleside and Bayview Stations.This natural bias can be countered with a larger police staff and the consideration of a new police station at Holyoke and Woolsey Streets. The bureaucracy needs to be changed to encourage better hiring and retention policies.

There is a crisis in graduating police cadets. The profession of a police officer has been degraded by the Defund-the-Police movement and we see this degradation here in San Francisco in the extremely low graduation counts of cadets from our city’s police academy. What we need is an incentive to not only promote recruitment, but an incentive to promote our law enforcement personnel to be part of our community. Therefore, I will propose a GI Bill style solution for recruitment and retention. Upon five years of service as a police officer from a cadet graduating from the academy, the city will pay for a down payment for a house located in San Francisco. The intent of this incentive is two fold:

1) Hire more police officers, and

2) Keep our police officers in our community.

Another issue that requires examination is gaining an understanding of how our elected judges are ruling on criminal cases. Frequently, we learn that people committing crimes are being released which results in them committing more crimes. The decision to release an offender is decided by a judge and gaining an understanding of how judges are ruling in criminal cases ought to be known to voters. With the levels of crime in District 9, information about rulings must be made more easily available for examination. This information ought to make people more connected to the criminal justice process which would promote a safer district.

Businesses need customers.

The bureaucracy has inadvertently made choices that directly reduce the number of customers our District’s businesses serve. For example, elimination of parking, parking costs, the Valencia bike lane, the Mission Street bus only lane, vehicle break-ins, and confusing traffic infrastructure such as no left turns or forced right turns. All of these bureaucratic choices encourage customers to stay home or go elsewhere.

I talk to people outside of District 9 that share freely that they would rather go outside San Francisco than our district because those locations are less of a hassle. This loss of visitors from outside our neighborhoods results in businesses looking to neighbors for business. The Mission Street business corridor can not be sustained by the neighborhood alone which helps explain why there are so many shuttered shops. This phenomenon is also happening to Geary Street in District 1.

Elder Care

Over one third of the residents in our district are over the age of sixty-five. Unfortunately, this is a time in life when health becomes more challenging. In the past when we had more multi-generational households, families would provide the necessary care that becomes inevitable. Today, we have far less households that are able to provide the care necessary to retain the dignity all should enjoy. To make our situation more perilous, there is a collapse in the number of young people relative to the number of elders which contributes sharply to not being able to provide this dignity.

This problem is too big to suggest a specific policy. However, I want to impress upon you that I understand the challenges and will resist cutting existing services when the inevitable budget crisis descends upon San Francisco. Furthermore, I will promote expanding existing services as one third of our residents deserve as much dignity as we may be able to give them.

Housing

The housing crisis is affecting us all. We need an immediate solution and a long term solution. Firstly, the Housing Element mandate is based upon a population projection growth of 0.3% per year until 2045. This may not be accurate as the population of California is contracting as measured by the 2020 US Census and subsequent IRS filing data showing people formerly in California are now filing outside of California. Although this downward growth trend is encouraging, this does not address the crisis that people can not pay their rent.

To address this acute housing crisis, we are going to need rental assistance programs to keep people in their houses, so they may continue to contribute to our economy. Because our economy is already in trouble, we need to prevent the loss of workers resulting from not being able to retain their housing. Since we have arrived to a point where rent payments are unsustainable, we as a city are going to be required to provide assistance until market forces provide relief in both higher wages and lower rents.

I agree that more housing built will lower rent prices. However, I also agree that we can not build our way out of this crisis. Regardless of the altruism of people, they get annoyed when their daily routine gets disturbed. This is the predominant explanation for NIMBYism. There is another problem with dense housing which is a fire code requirement to have two stairwells for buildings over two stories. Coupled with the need for private investment into affordable housing projects, affordable housing projects require large buildings on large areas of land that neighbors simply don’t want.

Therefore, I have a plan to increasing our housing supply without adversely affecting a neighborhoods current character. This solution is to permit SFR-1 homes to become duplexes. This solution coupled with automatic approval and reduced permit fees would not only provide an incentive to build housing quickly, but also promote better relationships between landlords and tenants. This solution would also create more opportunity for community and could contribute to tenants helping elder landlords when help is needed.

Drug addiction and alcoholism are diseases of isolation.

Individuals affected by drug addiction and alcoholism exhibit behaviors that perpetuate isolation. The unfortunate truth is that the individual needs to decide for themselves that they want to accept help. The harm-reduction model needs to be updated to reflect the needs of the current epidemic. We need to return to funding detox centers where people can receive the treatment they need to make the critical personal choice to change their lives.