Yo dawg, I heard you like less stabbing and lunch money stealing in your BART station so we took a 2.1 million dollar grant and removed those planter boxes.
SF Appeal reports:
On Thursday, the transit company is scheduled to accept a $2.1 million grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, as reported by the Ex. This money will go toward making the Mission district station cleaner and, they say, more secure for those that use it.
Get the full scoop at SF Appeal.
The weird thing is that the 24th St. station area doesn’t need to be cleaned up NEARLY as badly as the area around the 16th St. station. If you’re gonna clean up anywhere, it should be 16th St.
Agreed. I feel pretty safe, if on Yellow Alert, pretty much all the time at 24th St. Stn. The thugs and dealers and crackheads are 4x more aggressive at 16th St.; my personal observation is that the “activity” at 24th is fairly self-contained within social groups, but the 16th Street-people are in hot pursuit of a hustle and its fruits.
The corridor from Mission to Valencia is lively in a safe way on 24th and busy in a sketched-out way on 16th, not to mention the 15th-17th St. stretch of Mission that rivals 6th Street in crackheads per square inch.
In 15 years of Mission dwelling, I’ve observed a dozen or so violent crime-related incidents and near misses near the 16th Street BART, and zero at the 24th Street end.
The remodeling of 16th Street cost 4.3Million and they made a horrible space!!!! Cheese, pointless, bad… very bad.
So, why bother to do 24St for half that money?
And, BTW, I still can believe that a remodeling as such would cost that much money!!! Cost of government construction is totally OVERRATED here! Get a clue!
Wait a second… 16th street BART has ALREADY been “cleaned up” to the tune of 4.3m? That’s k-razy, cuz it is craptacular to the extreme.
No, it really does cost actual money to do actual things. 4.3M is nowhere near unreasonable.
Seriously, for 2.1 mil, we could employ the SF Guardian Angels for 10 years to circle the block 24/7 and fuck up people who look at other people the wrong way.
aw crap…does this mean more rogue slam poetry gatherings at night???
the article that is daisy-chained to in the examiner is horrible – for instance, how many of the car jackings have to do with the bart plaza?
the crimes that the reporter saw? poor people.
“Nevertheless, around noon Monday near the 24th Street station, people were openly drinking, homeless were laying near station escalators and the stench of trash and urine wafted around the area.”
i’m all for the cleanup because it’s nasty over there, but this is not going to reduce crime within 500 feet of the station.
stinky people, actually…
this is just a way to put money into some contractors/landscapers pockets and have them slowly move some bricks around and make way too much money doing it. if they really wanted the station to be safer they could employ security. if you had competent security guards working two at a time you would have a safe BART station for the next 8-10 years with that same budget.
I walk by the station at least twice a day, have for years. It could use a bit of love, maybe a few replaced bricks or somesuch, but I can’t really see what would make it “safer” except maybe more lighting, especially on the 23rd Street Side.
Otherwise it’s just drunks and junkies, who are mostly benign. If they don’t get to sprawl under the ugly BART trees, they’ll be camping out on the church steps, in the defunct 24th and Valencia bus stop or in my entryway. Of course these are already popular spots – though are almost a block away from the alley of heroin and the French robo potty.
I say the Mcdonald’s goes
Fuck’s sake. For $2.1 million, you could simply hire a cop or two to hang out near the station entrance for the next decade.
If u want cops and clean and quiet and lighting u obviously havent lived in the mission very long.it used to be fun.chaos fun.not yuppie or hipster lame fun..it was real!was anyway.it was the last of the wild west.what was the barbary coast is now the blackberry coast.ha ha