Bid to Renew S.F. Cleanup

Jenny Strasburg, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, October 27, 2002
Editor's note: Competing measures are on the Nov. 5 ballot to deal with San Francisco's homeless situation. The Chronicle Business section continues today its coverage of the issues and the involvement of the business community in this topic.
-- Last Sunday: Business backs Proposition N, hoping to stem economic losses.

-- Today: Reporter Jenny Strasburg takes a look at how San Francisco's only business improvement district has fared, and examines its future prospects. Also, reporter Pia Sarkar describes the co-existence of businesses and the homeless.
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More than three years after the Union Square Business Improvement District swept its first sidewalk, it remains San Francisco's only commercial area organized to tax itself in the quest for a cleaner, safer neighborhood.
The Union Square BID is a 30-person crew of trash-sweepers, sidewalk ambassadors, radio dispatchers and an off-duty police officer. They patrol a 10-block area defined by Market and Sutter streets, and Cyril Magnin Street and Grant Avenue.

A latecomer to a national trend that saw businesses organizing to tax themselves to deal with dirty streets and homelessness, San Francisco's first BID was expected by some to usher in a wave of self-improvement districts around the city.

That didn't happen. Bureaucratic barriers, opposition from homeless advocates, and a soaring economy -- which until recently made dirty streets a back-burner topic -- helped keep San Francisco largely off the BID bandwagon.

FUTURE OF PROGRAM IN QUESTION
The Union Square district faces challenges even to stay in business, according to supporters who'll soon campaign to continue the program past mid- 2004. Some worry that commercial landlords in the BID -- who pay from $1,000 to $10,000-plus apiece in annual assessments -- are feeling squeezed by the recession.

"I think the economy will hurt us. The discussions about homelessness probably will help us," said Karin Flood Eklund, who develops business plans for KTB Management, the private firm that manages the Union Square BID.

Now, City Hall is quietly starting a new conversation about BIDs amid the politicized wrangling over homelessness and the unkempt state of city streets - - conditions prompting businesses to complain about the toll on tourism and other sources of revenue.

It remains unclear whether this image-conscious city will embrace BIDs as a long-term solution.

"There's a belief, I think, that BIDs would empower property owners to too great of an extent," said Marco Li Mandri, a San Diego BID consultant whose firm, New City America, has helped launch two dozen California BIDs. "San Francisco is so behind other cities in terms of understanding the roles BIDs play in revitalizing cities."

Participating property owners and businesses often find city governments more responsive to their complaints about graffiti, overflowing trash and other problems, Li Mandri said. "The squeaky wheel gets the action, more or less."

Also, he said, urban-renewal grants go to cities that prove businesses and government can cooperate to clean up neighborhoods.

INFORMAL PARTNERSHIPS
In San Francisco, less formal merchant associations and neighborhood partnerships operate with varying levels of ambition and financial health from South of Market to Fisherman's Wharf. They include the 3-year-old SoMa Partnership, a clean-city program that provides formerly homeless people with training and jobs. It's modeled on a successful New York program, but recently lost key funding and is struggling to survive.

Other partnerships gaining traction in North Beach and Chinatown emulate successes at the wharf. "We don't need to tax ourselves right now -- maybe down the line," said longtime wharf booster Alessandro Baccari. "We're conceiving ways to raise funds and market one another."

Those groups are more loosely organized than BIDs, whose members are bound by law to pay fees overseen by local government.

Cities from New York to Los Angeles -- and including San Jose, Sacramento and Oakland -- operate hundreds of BIDs. Businesses and real-estate holders in those cities funnel tens of millions of dollars in private money each year toward what's typically viewed as a public problem.

Oakland's Lakeshore Avenue BID, a year older than Union Square's, assessed its property owners a combined $120,000 this year. Payoffs include clean sidewalks, community garden plots and more attention from Oakland's public- works crews, said Pamela Drake, the BID's executive director.

$65 PER SQUARE FOOT OF SIDEWALK

Union Square BID property owners, as shown on its annual report, pay about $65 per square foot of sidewalk frontage within the district boundaries. That formula drew more than $80,000 in fees from Macy's last year -- along with $54, 000 from the Westin St. Francis, $6,500 from the Sephora beauty-products store and $1,600 from John's Grill, for starters. BIDs in other cities assess business owners instead of landlords or collect money from both.

Union Square property owners paid about $814,000 toward a $1 million budget last year. The city gave $200,000 for steam-cleaning above the normal level of city services.

AMBASSADORS ON FOOT
The BID's street ambassadors have a broad job description that includes greeting tourists, calling police in response to crimes, calling medics for emergencies and confronting panhandlers and sidewalk squatters.

Some days, "I get caught exactly in the middle," said ambassador supervisor Wayne Alexis, 38, who makes $13 an hour and interacts regularly with people who are homeless or posing as homeless in order to elicit sympathy. When their tempers flare, Alexis said, it's usually because there's a shortage -- or excess -- of drugs or alcohol on the street.

Panhandlers commonly scream at BID employees -- conspicuous in red shirts and jackets -- for interrupting their business, said Robert Owens, 34, another ambassador. Sometimes tourists and locals berate him for hassling the homeless.

"They say we treat people bad," Owens said, adamantly disagreeing and adding that he has seen many people die as a result of living on the street. "We're helping them, most of the time."

"The people in the red coats, I look at them as guardian angels," said Otis Jackson, 55, who said he has been homeless for four years and spends most nights sheltered from the elements somewhere on Potrero Hill.

The crackdown on panhandling is a hassle, Jackson said. But he said street ambassadors also protect the homeless by taming the most aggressive criminal elements of Union Square.

Before the Union Square BID launched in July 1999, earlier plans for larger districts failed. The BID required a signature drive among the owners of 91 properties and majority approval of the Board of Supervisors. Proponents included then-Supervisor Barbara Kaufman, Macy's West and the Kimpton Hotel Group.

BID TO EXTEND CONCEPT
This month, Mayor Willie Brown's Office of Business and Economic Development issued an invitation for BID consultants to propose how the city could create more self-taxing districts.

"We wanted to draw on the successes of other cities and states," said Leamon Abrams, Brown's economic development director. City Hall is cautious, though -- not wanting San Francisco's thinly stretched street-cleaning and trash-control budget to favor BID areas unfairly, Abrams said.

"How do you make sure that low-income neighborhoods don't get the short end of the stick? That has been an issue in some cities," he said.

The city's Department of Public Works staff meets regularly with groups in neighborhoods including Clement Street, North Beach and mid-Market, said Mohammed Nuru, deputy director of operations for DPW, which has a $30 million budget for street cleaning, steam blasting public areas, erasing graffiti and performing related services.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose district includes Union Square, said he supports the concept of BIDs but still has questions: "Are there any cost savings or efficiencies for the city? Are we throwing more money or less money at that area than we were before the BID?"

Proponents of more BIDs in San Francisco point to New York as a model, where dozens of BIDS operate, some since the 1970s. They are widely credited with eliminating grime and squalor from high-profile areas such as Times Square -- though not without controversy. Critics have long accused New York BIDs of trampling on the rights of homeless by sweeping them out of neighborhoods.

That charge hasn't disappeared since San Francisco's 1990s fight over BIDs.

CONSIDERATION FOR THE HOMELESS
A vocal critic of the Union Square BID, Paul Boden of San Francisco's Coalition on Homelessness said self-assessed districts fail to address citywide housing and social-service needs. "The premise . . . is to remove the presence, the sight, the visibility of homeless people from that specific part of town," he said. "We're going to have homeless people no matter how many BIDs we have."

Union Square BID proponents deny they're trying to rid the area of homelessness. They generally agree, however, that enforcing laws against aggressive panhandling, public urination and trespassing has made the sidewalks less inviting for homeless people.

"The homeless need help, but the homeless are not our main problem," said Leigh Ann Baughman, executive director of the Union Square district. "If they're drunk or peeing on the sidewalk, that's illegal. It's not illegal for them to be here."

ENDEMIC PROBLEM
Some Union Square merchants and landlords regularly pressure the BID to roust law-abiding homeless people, said KTB Chief Executive Mary McCue. She said the BID struggles to balance its clean-and-safe mission with the homeless presence.

"I think we did not realize how difficult the quality-of-life issues were, how intractable they were," McCue said. "People are in dire medical circumstances (who are) living or trying to do business on the streets."

The Union Square BID needs more money to maintain what it has accomplished, one high-profile backer said.

"We've got to renew the BID," said Louis Meunier, a Macy's West executive vice president and BID director. "When we (created it), the economy wasn't particularly stellar. It's not now and probably won't be . . . but this is necessary to keeping the area the way it is and continuously improving it."

At the Burger King on Powell Street near the cable car turnaround, James Hatley, whose family owns the restaurant, said he pays $40,000-plus a year for private security, plus $4,200 in BID dues.

The BID's $1 million budget might be better spent on more off-duty police officers in the area, he said. But he agreed that Union Square is cleaner because of the BID.

"I think I would probably vote for it" to continue, he said. "But when I see panhandlers bothering people, I wonder, 'Where's the BID?' It's a little frustrating."

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Union Square Business Improvement District
City's first and only self-taxed commercial area under state BID law

Goals include: Security, clean sidewalks and retail growth

Launched July 1999

Roughly 10 square blocks

Approximately $1 million annual budget

Renewal is required for BID to continue past July 2004

Sources: Union Square BID, Chronicle research