H Brown rips Randy Shaw a new one during public testimony at the Twitter tax break hearing, on March 16, 2011, describing Shaw as one of the reasons why businesses are reluctant to move to the Mid Market area in the first place.
The Civic Center blog has a more in depth writeup and Tenderblog has joined in (archive link) along with Rincon Hill SF Archived link
the cruel joke in San Francisco is how your taxes are being used to ruin Mid-Market with more taxes being used to try and fix it again
The Bulldog speech comes 30 minutes after Randy Shaw spoke, which is characterized as bizarre mixture of the megalomaniacal and pugnacious (see the link for a transcribing)
Randy Shaw 2011
“Then when we elected Art Agnos mayor, he signed legislation on May 12th, 1990 that protected all of our residential hotels. I rewrote the entire ordinance and made it enforceable. In 1985, we also passed the rezoning of the Tenderloin to stop commercial development, to stop all tourist development, stop buildings over eight stories.
So in 1990, I was asked by a committee putting out a document called “Tenderloin 2000” if I was concerned about gentrification in the future of the neighborhood, and I said in 1990, and it’s in the document, “Gentrification. We’ve stopped gentrification. Our problem is we can’t get any investment. We are a neighborhood starved for investment.” This was 1990. We then had the dot-com boom, the biggest economic explosion the city’s ever had, but it bypassed mid-Market and the Tenderloin. We then had the housing bubble which turned Fresno and Stockton into booming areas, but did not do so for the uptown Tenderloin or mid-Market.”
H Brown 2011 30 minutes later
“I’ve been in the Tenderloin between 30 and 40 years, and I can tell you exactly what happened there. When I moved in, mid-Market was booming, a lot of burlesque places and stuff like that, but it was all working class people living in these SROs. What happened? Two things happened. First, all of the working people moved out. The reason they moved out…is because a young man came to San Francisco with a business plan. He got control of the buildings through the city, and he filled the buildings full of drunks and drug addicts and insane people. And you know why? Because the government, all branches of government, send checks to him every month to take care of their rent. He doesn’t have to worry about a poor family that was going to move out.
That man’s name is Randy Shaw. The guy standing up here wanting to avoid gentrification, he did reverse gentrification. You have twelve to fifteen thousand drunks, drug addicts and insane people living in that area. In one building, the Seneca, he had 464 police calls in the last six months. This guy is going to be your saviour?”
After mentioning that the city missed its chance to warehouse the worst of the deadbeats at the newly decommissioned Presidio and Treasure Island sites, Brown concluded:
“Remember, the reason that neighborhood is holy hell is because of Randy Shaw’s business plan. All the drunks, insane people, and addicts who are there are his customers, and the drug dealers who come in from the East Bay come in to service them. That’s your problem”
see comments here for more