Jason Henderson and the Tea Party
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| 555 Fulton Street |
Yet another Shoup axiom is "Planning for parking is more a political than a professional activity." Instead of being creative, Fulton Ventures balked at the parking ideas and employed divisive race-baiting to push its profit-driven agenda. It financed a quiet campaign to accuse anyone supporting the formula retail ban and reducing parking as racist and elitist. It leaned heavily on City Hall and somehow got the Planning Department to suddenly retract its support for upholding the chain store ban. Sup. London Breed, who remained publicly detached, insisted that all she cared about was an affordable supermarket, but she offered no path to achieve it. In a confusing Oct. 3 hearing, supporters of Fulton Ventures LLC made below-the-belt public comments that seemed to come straight out of a Tea Party playbook. It was tough to watch. Their position was that a chain store with excessive underground parking was the only way to an affordable grocer---anything short of that was racist. The commission voted 4-2 to lift the ban.
"Reducing parking" may not be racist, but it surely is elitist in this instance. Fulton Ventures is right to play the race card here, since this would be the only supermarket in San Francisco that wasn't allowed any customer parking---and it would be located in a black neighborhood.
Like most cyclists in San Francisco, Henderson is a white guy, who doesn't see any problem with requiring only black people---and people in the neighborhood with families, the elderly, and the disabled---to hump their groceries home on foot or on Muni. Hey, why can't they ride bikes?
The Tea Party reference is odd, since it's the Tea Party itself that's accused of racism, not playing the race card in this kind of context. Besides, you can argue---and I do here and here---that the real equivalent to the extremist Tea Party in San Francisco is the anti-car left typified by privileged white guys like Henderson.
SF's leftist Tea Party likes Critical Mass.
Labels: Anti-Car, Critical Mass, Jason Henderson, Parking, The SF Bay Guardian
posted by Rob Anderson @ 11:24 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Reducing parking is elitist? It's the elite that need the parking!
The store will have to pay for that free parking by passing on higher prices to consumers. People who drive to the store get something for that. The people who are not elite have to pay for the parking they aren't using.
Shithead
Crocodile tears from a bike guy for poor people! Take a look at all the parking spaces inside the nearby public housing. Seems like a lot of poor and working people in that neighborhood have cars.
The cars are all owned by the drug dealers and prostitutes - whom you apparently approve of because you want them to be able to park at the store.
This Henderson guy is amazing, he just moved to SF and already is solving all its problems! Thank god he arrived just in time!
He came from New Orleans where he left them with the blueprint for post-Katrina development based on all the New Urbanist cliches:
"Bus rapid transit, with priority bus lanes, signal priority, proof-of-payment and low-floor platforms would be constructed throughout the city. The city would also build a comprehensive network of bike lanes" etc, etc.
But his Big Vision is that "the balance of the New Orleans population (approximately 500-600,000) would relocate to Baton Rouge, Hammond, and Lafayette"!
(One wonders how this genius can stomach being relegated to teaching undergraduates at a second rate junior college when he has the vision for saving whole populations.) Will these relocation areas be called "re-education camps" or "reservations"? Will blacks and Mexicans get priority for all this wonderful new housing hundreds of miles away? Will there be no parking lots at the grocery stores because everyone will be walking, biking or taking BRT?
You can read his brilliance here: Saving New Orleans
Thanks for the link, Anon. Oh yes, we're so lucky to have Henderson and all the other "new urbanist" carpetbagging Big Thinkers to show San Francisco how to deal with its traffic:
"the funding for the rebuilding of New Orleans, including densification of Baton Rouge, Hammond, and Lafayette, should be financed by a nation-wide 50-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline"
People must be punished/fined for driving motor vehicles to pay for this bullshit. Of course that tax will never happen, but Congestion Pricing in SF will be the ultimate trump card played by Henderson, the Bicycle Coalition and their enablers in PC City Hall.
The SFCTA is working on Congestion Pricing now, and the Golden Gate Bridge system is a trial run for the system City Hall plans to install---for our own good!
More importantly for City Hall, it will provide it with an endless flow of revenue to support the city's burgeoning bureaucracy, especially at the MTA, which has more than 5,000 employees.
The main obstacle is the people of San Francisco, who perversely oppose being charged to drive downtown in their own city.
City Hall will get around that by not allowing SF to vote on the issue, just like they did with the Bicycle Plan and the ongoing redesign of city streets on behalf of the 3.4% of city residents that ride bicycles.
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