I wrote a speech to deliver to the Golden Hill Planning Committee tonight. Unfortunately, I had to take Alison to urgent care and was unable to edit it down to three minutes and get to the meeting on time to deliver it. So I present it here in its unedited form... My name is Andrew Hinkle. I moved to North Park in 1994 and bought my first home here in South Park in February of 1997. So I have been in South Park nearly 18 years and nearly 20 in the surrounding community. When I moved here there were no boutique clothing stores, no fancy chocolatiers, no wine bars nor craft-brew tap rooms. Our business district consisted solely of Rebeccas, The Big Kitchen, Mazarras, Snippys, a used appliance store and little more than that beyond boarded-up buildings. I moved here for one simple reason. It was the only place I could afford to buy. My historic home had been reduced to a foreclosure flop house for needle junkies, as the owner had been put in jail for running a meth lab. I paid $103,000, tore it down to the studs and lovingly restored it to the best of my meager $25,000 budget. I say all this not to brag, but to illustrate that I am not a NIMBY newbie to our community. I have benefited greatly by the gentrification and growth our neighborhood has seen in the last 18 years. In fact, I have actively contributed to it. As a real estate agent and mortgage broker, I encouraged as many of my friends who would listen to move into our neighborhood and showed them the means to finance the rehabilitation of their own future dream homes. When an independent record store moved in, I worked as an unpaid volunteer for their record label. Long before there was a South Park Walkabout, I walked with a flashlight on Friday nights as part of an anti-graffiti, crime watch and neighborhood cleanup organized by local realtor, Samantha Keenan. Many years ago, I remember a good friend coining a brilliant term to describe our neighborhood. He said we were living in the Golden Era of Gentrification, when the artists and cultural pioneers could still afford to live here, but the desirable conditions they helped create had yet to price them out of the market. In that vein, I still promote a local musician showcase every month at the Whistlestop and I curate the art that hangs on their walls. So it is not with backward or anti-growth conviction that I say the following. Target is not the type of store that I want in my neighborhood. It is in fact, the final nail in the coffin of that Golden Era. I have nothing against Targets five different stores within a four mile radius of where we stand right now. And to be completely honest there are some in our neighborhood who welcome the arrival of a Target. But I promise you this, not one person ever moved to this community for its convenient walking access to a multinational, billion-dollar corporate big-box chain-store. Target claims they will be good corporate stewards and they arent building a big box. They claim they will respect the character of our neighborhood, the history and architecture of the building, and only bring in what we want. But the truth is, the Care About South Park group has gathered over a thousand signatures from our neighbors that dont want Target here at all. This is only their second Target Express, a self-described experiment where the only precedent is a college campus location in the hometown of their corporate headquarters, not an historic building in an historic neighborhood. Is our neighborhood the proper place for this experiment whose primary mission is to compete with the smaller Wal-Marts infiltrating neighborhoods like the recent addition in Sherman Heights? I understand this is private land and we dont get to hand pick the tenants for the owners property. But the owners, the Hirmez family, are not being honest with us about their intentions either. They claim they are old and want to retire, yet the truth is they are planning a new independent grocery store in Ocean Beach. This stings as an added insult to our community as we are crying out for a grocery store here, while they sell out the largest swatch of unredeveloped land, the very physical center and heart of our community to the highest corporate bidder in order to build elsewhere, exactly what our community desperately wants here. I also know our city, Todd Gloria and the Department of Development Services has a history of bending the law to the will of corporate developers. Weve seen it happen with the Jack in the Box in North Park when, as an unelected interim mayor, Todd Gloria reversed a stop work order by the former elected mayor in the middle of a lawsuit over multiple code violations. We have also seen it at KFC in North Park and most recently in Sherman Heights when Walmart demolished an historic building against a court order while Development Services sat idly on their hands. The lawsuit against Walmart was eventually won by the community and Department Services was admonished by the state for violating dozens of their own municipal codes. Yet the Wal-Mart still stands. If this was a proposed Wal-Mart, I guarantee the entire community would be united against it. Yet despite the designer prints on their plastic dinnerware, Targets products are made in the same Chinese factories, they have the same anti-union labor practices, they contribute the maximum amount of money allowable to candidates on both sides of the political aisle in order to garner favor in running over communities like ours. This is evidenced in their maximum contribution to Michelle Bachmans victory commitee. They have no ideology beyond growth regardless of the wishes of communities that oppose them. All that said, this isnt about an anti-corporate mentality. This is about equal access to the law. Monied political contributors shouldnt be allowed to run rough shod over municipal codes while my neighbor gets a stop work order while trying to build a room addition for his second daughter. Combined with Todd Glorias dubious track record of protecting our neighborhoods in favor of large corporate developers along with the City and Development Services stances that ignore the wishes of the neighborhood they are supposed to represent over the desires of those same corporations, I have serious reservations about the outcome of this proposed project. I beg Todd Gloria to be vigilant in making sure our municipal codes are enforced as equally to large corporate developers (and political donors) as they are to my neighbor building a room for his daughter. I humbly ask Target to make good on their promise to respect the character of our community and the neighboring independent stores that helped develop a place that makes Target viable here. I ask this committee to do everything in their power to support the cause of maintaining the character and history of our neighborhood. And I ask the Hirmez family to carefully consider how they are selling out our community for the capital to build a brand new independent grocery store in Ocean Beach, the very thing most of our community is begging for here. We ask politely now. But should you choose to ignore us, I promise we will hold you accountable and organize against you. We will rally against the political advancement of those that ignore us. We will boycott the retail sales of your products. We will create a public relations nightmare that will haunt your future ambitions in neighborhood beyond ours. We will seek all legal remedies available to us. And if you dont believe us, turn on the local news tonight. Read the papers in the following week. Our community has already organized and you are officially on watch.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 04:23:45 +0000
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