Mama Dee Is Mad, Part 2

by Bruce Allison and Thornton Kimes

Sitting many hours, listening to the Planning Commission, is not an easy thing to do. Bruce did it for approximately 12 hours October 15th, 2009, I lasted less than 3. The CPMC hospital proposal for the Van Ness corridor, finally came up at 8p.m. after 4 hours spent on a project threatening Open Space on De Haro Street.

You can always tell when the Sutter Corporation people are around by the red folders and their unrelenting ability to be “on-message”.

This corporation has told many lies, done many interesting things (like sucking $1 million out of Marin General Hospital for who-knows-what), including their current hard and soft sell of transforming what used to be the Jack Tar Hotel—now the Cathedral Hill Hotel, mere blocks from Thornton Kimes’ SRO hotel—into a giant boutique for-rich-folks-only hospital, while draining the life, money, bricks and mortar from their other hospitals which have served poor people for, apparently, too many years.

This poverty scholar was not surprised (but the other writer of this article WAS…) to know that CPMC/Sutter doesn’t only want the Cathedral Hill Hotel, it wants space on the other side of the Van Ness and Geary/Post block for this Frankenstein’s Monster project lurching into our collective rear-view mirror. Many small business people, including the Vietnamese and other South-east Asian women who run the 24/7 doughnut shop that Tiny and Mama Dee loved and still loves, will see their dreams shattered and lose the source of their income. San Francisco will lose the tax money they have been paying into city coffers for years, for however long it takes to build this monster—if it is actually built.

They destroyed villages to "save them" in Vietnam. Now they want to do damage to the tax base of San Francisco to put in a hospital we don’t need (I almost quoted “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, not exactly the definition of “automatic writing” but close enough). This other poverty scholar article writer wonders if the doughnut shop women, who I have also come to appreciate (and took their doughnuts to watch movies down the street instead of buying vastly more expensive corporate movie theater candy…), feel a bit of “burn the village…” déjà vu?

Ms. Nancy, one of the workers at the doughnut shop, spoke at the hearing, using this poverty scholar’s time for an extra two minutes. She said that as a person who speaks limited English CPMC/Sutter’s project will make it incredibly difficult for her to find another job.

The people selling the hospital project visited the doughnut shop and told Ms. Nancy and others they didn’t need to bother showing up for any hearings, it was a “done deal”. The truth is they don’t even have permits to tear anything down or build anything new up, haven’t done an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) or any other preliminary study the “Usual Suspects” do when they attempt dotting i’s and crossing t’s.

Among other truths here, the other poverty scholar responsible for this article experienced considerable construction of needed and unneeded stuff in the same neighborhood over the past 2 years—an “affordable housing” building at Hyde and Turk, a Community Housing Partners SRO right next door to his SRO--and a building on Van Ness between O’Farrell and Eddy. This is all part of the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan (ENP), the Cathedral Hill Hotel is on the far, well, frontier of it.

One of POOR Magazine’s alternative media allies/friends/partners, the Mission District-oriented El Tecolote monthly newspaper has run many articles about the ENP, so, please, readers of this space, check them and their coverage of it out, keep watching for more here, and, most definitely, we want your bodies sitting in front of the Planning Commission—and your voices talking to them about this and the need for more and better health care for those who really need it in this town: the poor.