Before Newsom's $11.5 million redevelopment of the mid-Market Street area goes into effect, one of San Francisco's grittiest areas will be as nasty as it wants to be. Take, for example, this morning's stabbing session on the first block of Sixth Street. Appeal reports that "[a] black woman and a white man were having a fight on the first block of 6th Street, when the woman stabbed the man. His injuries were not life-threatening, and she was arrested."

Former SF pot club owner Kenneth Hayes (pictured here in 1999), whose Sixth Street dispensary, the Harm Reduction Center, was raided by federal agents in 2002, was sentenced to six months of home confinement today by a federal judge. Hayes' co-defendent, Oakland marijuana advocate Ed Rosenthal got probation, despite a federal law stating that he should get at least five years in prison for supplying Hayes with his pot. Both men existed in murky legal territory, having worked with local authorities to set up their businesses and believing they were acting within the law -- just not the federal one.

We expect that Hayes -- who now lives in San Bruno after escaping to Canada and Romania, spending years "broke and eating potatoes" while trying to avoid a prison term -- will have a quiet six months on his couch with a vaporizer and a few box sets of The Wire and Weeds to catch up on.

Not likely. But a new effort to sanitize Sixth Street is underway, starting this month, care of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. And what, exactly, will clean up San Francisco's scariest and urineiest intersection? Two-way radios. According to SF Examiner, "Two full-time officials will begin patrolling the street and its alleys this month. They will have two-way radios to report crimes, provide advice and clear paths for pedestrians." The city will dish out $150,000 to employ two full-time guides (not SFPD officers?) to "patrol the corridor for a year." SF Coalition on Homelessness, of course, thinks this is a bad idea. COH Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach tells the Ex that these kinds of programs simply "remove the presence of poor people," homeless or not.