Take A Walk on the Polk Side

Speaking of cleaning up the streets, people on Polk Street are trying to have a major rehaul done in an attempt to make it less grimy. Twenty-nine commercial spaces are either vacant or under construction along the Lower Polk corridor and all the businesses and developers are looking to help clean the area up in order to increase their business. For whatever reason, they think that having to climb over transvestite heroin junkies nodding out isn't the kind of thing people want to do if they come to a neighborhood. And also, lots of vacancies equals more crime and the more crime the more vacancies and so on and so forth.

To remedy the situation, officials are planning on adding historic street lamps (ooohhh) and planting more trees to pretty the place up. There is also a call for a moratorium on liquor stores and sex shops. Hmmm...you know what would help, a new name.

Of course, this wouldn't be San Francisco without some sort of fight over an attempt to clean up the place. We linked to this story earlier, but now it's even more applicable and that is that there seems to be a back lash, led by those loveable band of misfits Queer Shame, to not de-grime the area. Most of the article is for subscribers only (believe it or not, we don't subscribe to the WSJ) but one of the denizens on The Wall cut and paste it in. The basic gist of the article is that a business owner who tried to get trees planted had Queer Shame put her mug on "Most Wanted" posters placed all over the Tenderloin. The reason for the backlash, of course, being that if you make the place cleaner, the place becomes less seedy and the people who like it seedy want to keep it seedy. It turns out too that they have a friend on the Board who seems to support them. And you'll never guess who-- Fiona Ma. No, just joking, it's Chris Daly.

Because we here at SFist like to believe we can help, we have a modest proposal. Let's create some sort of UnCommunity Benefit District-- residents and business, along with prostitutes and junkies, would put their money together to make sure an area is seedy. Like they could pay people not to clean up. Or ship in more prostitutes and smackheads. We could even turn it into an amusement park type- place called "Seedy Land" or "Gus Van Sant World" or even "It's a Small Gulch After All" where people could come from all over to visit and get blown for $10 by animatronic crack whores. It'll be like Amsterdam. Except not clean.

Think of all the revenue that could be made.