San Francisco devolving?

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SFGate.com July, 22, 2001

Help wanted: urban honey dippers

Rob Morse

So what do we do about the cesspool that is San Francisco?

After Monday's column on the subject, I got more than 500 e-mails, dozens of letters and so many calls the voice mail melted down. It touched a very raw nerve.

All I did was complain. That's all most of us have done. Not Gideon Kramer.

A few months ago, Kramer decided he'd had it with the vandalism in his neighborhood near Mission Dolores. The DPW wasn't doing much, so one day he went out and started painting over graffiti. Using paints in official government colors, he restored nearly every lamp post, trash bin and other piece of public property.

Every day he patrols for litter, posters and graffiti. He says that's the trick of repelling vandals.

"I've kind of made a personal mission out of this, and I've even started an organization called 'Mission: Beautify,' " says Kramer. "Right now it's an organization of one, but as far as the vandals know, there are many of us."

There are many of us -- at least potentially.

On Monday, Dorothy Dill and Evelyn Green called separately and said the same thing. They said they were born and raised in San Francisco and would like to be able to go downtown again.

They both left their phone numbers and offered to campaign for a safer, civilized downtown. Green said, "If there's anything I can do, give me a call."

As a city official I know said, "They want to be able to be San Franciscans again."

The civic virtues survive. Unfortunately, many native San Franciscans have fled.

"My beautiful city gone to the dogs (human dogs)," writes Charles J. McLaughlin, a retired SFPD officer who now lives in Nevada City. He says that after short visits here, he just wants to escape. "I go home and dream of the way it was."

Those who immigrated here are leaving, too.

Laura Bell Way says out-of-town relatives ask why she's selling her flat in the city and commuting three hours a day from the North Bay. "I respond with a summary of my daily walk through the Mission to BART and through downtown," says Way. "My tally of trash tornadoes, prostitutes, piles of human feces, aggressive panhandlers and description of grime usually quiets them down."

"San Francisco is an overpriced, unlivable facade of a city, whose only redeeming factor is that it looks good from a distance," writes Gerry Thrash. "I'm moving back to L.A."

OAKLAND IS CLEANER THAN SAN FRANCISCO, according to one reader. Another said Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with a per capita income of $600, looks better than downtown San Francisco. (It's true. I once lived there.) Dozens of people mentioned New York.

"I just got back from three days in New York, where I didn't see a single panhandler or homeless person," wrote Ted Cruze. "If NY can be cleaned up, why can't SF? As a Democrat I am beginning to wonder if SF would be better off with a Republican mayor."

I will refrain from saying we already have one, by comparison with the Board of Supervisors. Sometimes they do work together.

"I called the mayor's office to complain about the mess and they said, 'Let me give you the Board of Supervisors,' " said Mike Greenhall. "Before I could even finish a sentence, the Board of Supervisors said, 'Let me give you the mayor's office.' "

The political message I got last week was loud and clear, and politicians got it too, judging by the Ccs on the e-mails: If you want to run for office in San Francisco, you must have a plan to make this filthy place San Francisco again.

Becky Palmer of Larimer County, Colo., stopped over in San Francisco with her family on the way back from Hawaii. "We drove downtown to go to dinner and my 6-year-old daughter witnessed a naked, drunk man rolling around on the sidewalk trying to pull his underwear up around his ankle," wrote Palmer, who doesn't want to return to San Francisco again.

"My daughter got a full view of everything," she said. "People walked by him like it was an everyday occurrence."

Once upon a time, we thought tourists didn't see the real San Francisco. Now they do, and we avoid seeing it.

WE HAVE AS MUCH BLAME AS GRIME. Reagan shut down the mental hospitals, said many readers. But many liberals called for "de-institutionalization" and halfway houses. Turns out they're made of cardboard.

Dr. F. L. Kotkin, a former Bay Area resident who lives in Seattle, once worked in a state mental hospital. He notes that, without such institutions, making people take medication is nearly impossible.

"What is really needed is to reopen state hospitals and make it legally possible to commit people who need close supervision," writes Kotkin. "Until we face that reality, the mentally ill will be on the streets; it's no life for them, and it's no life for us."

Somehow, San Francisco twisted the virtue of tolerance into the vice of tolerating any behavior, no matter how loathsome.

"Liberals chose to forgo personal responsibility and embraced 'victimization,' " wrote an anonymous reader. "You have reaped what you sowed."

We do have a personal responsibility for the city. If anyone says that cleaning up San Francisco is gentrification or a war on the poor, a man who has taken personal responsibility has an answer.

Says Gideon Kramer: "Poor people should not live in squalor any more than anyone else."

Rob Morse's column appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. His e-mail address is rmorse@sfchronicle.com.

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-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), July 23, 2001

Answers

I don't give a shit for one over the other, but it was Carter who closed the mental hospitals.

-- KoFE (your@town.USSA), July 23, 2001.

America's most beautiful city. Such a waste.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), July 23, 2001.

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