“If you’re trying to revive Civic Center, you need to turn it into a place to go. One of the struggles of this business is that on Saturdays, Civic Center is not a place to go. ‘Hey, let’s go to Civic Center on Saturday!’ You don’t say that. You say, ‘Let’s go to Hayes Valley on Saturday, let’s go to the Ferry Building on Saturday.’ People live here but they don’t find leisure here.
It’s great that they’re going to do a redesign of Civic Center but my concern is what are we going to do about those people who are currently there and need those services. A lot of homeless people that I have personally talked to say that, ‘Yeah, there are great services here in San Francisco. There are shelters. But I would rather live on the streets than go to a shelter,’ because it’s safer and it’s much more consistent for them to live on the streets than wait hours in line to maybe get a bed in the shelter. So that’s one of the struggles. How do we solve that problem? We do have services, yes, but is there a follow up after that?”
“The culture [in San Francisco] is not the same anymore. It used to be the culture of people hanging out on their stoops, talking to each other, talking to neighbors, saying hello, reading. Now everyone who you see out here is always on their phone. Their concerned about socializing, but when it comes to you and me right here, this is socializing! Posting ‘I’m at blue bottle.’ That’s not socializing.
That essence of being a human is gone.”
“People are not bringing culture with them. They’re here to experience the culture that’s already here that we’ve made for them. They go out, they hang out, go get drunk, party, do their work, and then they leave and then they go on to a new job somewhere else down in the Silicon Valley. And that’s what happens. People live here for a couple of years and then they leave and go on to a new job. So who gets left with the culture? We do. We see that.”
