Family of Alex Nieto Begins Legal Action Against City

/ Todd_Lappin / 35 Comments

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Bernal resident Alex Nieto was killed on Bernal Hill following an officer-involved shooting on March 21. Yesterday, attorney John Burris filed a lawsuit on behalf of Nieto’s family seeking to compel the City to provide additional information about the circumstances surrounding his death. The SF Examiner reports:

Alejandro Nieto, 28, a San Francisco resident, was killed in Bernal Heights Park after being asked to show his hands but instead drawing a stun gun that was mistaken for a real gun, according to police.

On the steps of City Hall on Monday, about 30 people held a banner asking for justice as a lawyer for the family announced the claim filing with the City Attorney’s Office and called on outside agencies to investigate the incident.

“The version of the story that the police have trotted out, we have concerns and frankly skepticism,” said Adante Pointer, one of the family’s attorneys.

The City has 45 days to respond to the claim, after which the Nieto family can sue for what it says was an unjustified killing.

However, well-known civil-rights attorney John Burris, whose firm is representing the Nietos, said any questions about the incident will never be answered under the current system, therefore the family must sue to find out what really happened.

That system of police oversight, from the Office of Citizen Complaints to the District Attorney’s Office, rarely finds police in the wrong, Burris said. Yet at least three recent incidents — a federal indictment of six officers for allegedly violating constitutional rights, a police-involved shooting that ended with a wounded officer and Nieto’s death — show they do in fact mess up and even break the laws, he said.

“It’s always justified,” said Burris of the findings of most investigations into police shootings.

Some of the questions that remain unanswered include how many times Nieto was shot, the names of the officers involved, and why police questioned the Nieto family and searched their home before informing them of Alejandro Nieto’s death.

Alex Nieto’s friends and family have created a website for him at justice4alexnieto.org. In addition, they plan to hold monthly Burritos on Bernal tribute walks on the 21st of each month, starting this Monday, April 21 at 5 pm. The walks will begin in Precita Park, and proceed up to Bernal Hill.

PHOTO: Nieto’s father (wearing 49ers cap) and John Burris (at microphone) yesterday at City Hall. Photo by Steve Rhodes

 

Sign Up Now to Get a Sidewalk Tree In Front of Your Bernal Home

/ Todd_Lappin / 26 Comments

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Neighbor Phil Pierce live on Tompkins Street. By day he works as the community outreach coordinator for Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF), the greentastic group that organizes sidewalk greenery plantings here in the City.

Neighbor Phil is spreading the word that Friends of the Urban Forest is planning a tree-planting in Bernal Heights, so if you want one in front of your house, you should sign up now:

FUF has green ($$) to make your block green!

Do you want to get a tree in front of your property?
We are coming to the Bernal Heights, and now is your chance to be a part of it!

Friends of the Urban Forest has funding to subsidize 75% of the costs to plant trees, with a Community Planting Day planned for June 14, 2014.

You only need to pay $135 and choose what species you want — then FUF will handle all of the prep work, remove the cement, provide the tree itself, and do three scheduled tree care visits over the first three years of the tree’s life to help it thrive!

For more information, visit the Bernal Heights page.
or
Contact Caitlin@fuf.net, (415) 268-0772

Deadline for forms is 4/30

PHOTOS: Friends of the Urban Forest

Fruitless Car Break-In Captured in Security Camera Video

/ Todd_Lappin / 11 Comments

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Once again, a street-facing security camera has captured detailed footage of an infuriating crime in Bernal Heights. This latest incident was non-violent, fortunately, but also terribly common.

A neighbor on Elsie narrates the security camera video [Dropbox-hosted] that shows a would-be thief breaking in to her family’s car:

My husband’s car got broken into [during the week of April 7, 2014] in front of our house on Eslie, and we have it on video. It’s not as riveting as the recent robbery video that Bernalwood posted, but it’s interesting to see how they do it.

This happened at about 2am. You see a car driving slowly along the street, close to the parked cars. I am guessing they are looking for Hondas/Acuras, because they have shaved keys. They then stop in my neighbor’s driveway, and two people get out.

The first guy works on my husband’s car (black Honda) for a while, apparently not noticing that the rear passenger window (the small panel behind the main window) had been knocked out in an earlier break-in. The second guy starts working on other cars on the street. It’s hard to see because the windowframe is blocking him, but you can see him start to work (unsuccessfully) on my visiting mother-in-law’s Prius behind the Honda, then you can see his shadow as he goes across the street.

The first guy eventually gets in through the driver’s door and gets all the way into the car and shuts the door. He was rifling through stuff on the inside (everything was all over the place in my husband’s car this a.m.), and then he pops the trunk and looks inside. My husband’s car has been broken into so many times that he doesn’t leave anything – even pennies – in there. Eventually, the first guy gets out and goes back to the waiting car, and the second guy comes running up and hops in, and the car drives off.

Neighbor Laurie Wigham’s Original Watercolors on Display at Bernal Library

/ Todd_Lappin / 7 Comments

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Neighbor Laurie Wigham should need no interaction to in-the-know Bernalwood readers, because her terrific watercolors of scenes around Bernal Hill have brought a lot of smiles to our faces. Now some of  Neighbor Laurie’s watercolor are on display in the Bernal Heights Library.

I finally got through the Spring Break college tours and had a chance to put up those watercolors in the library. There wasn’t room for nearly as many as I would have liked to show, but you will recognize some of them.

Indeed we do!  For example:

The show is part of the ongoing series of displays in the library foyer by members of the Russellers watercolor group. Neighbor Laurie adds that the group is “open to all, and meets every other Friday downstairs in the library.”

Elsie Street Library Opens Mysterious Main Branch

/ Todd_Lappin / 9 Comments

STEUER-mainbranch1 Neighbor Sharon found a secret public library tucked away along a leafy portion of Elsie Street north of Cortland. She has no idea how or when it got there:

I’ve always thought of Bernal as “Brigadoon” — a small town atop a hill in a city where even San Francisco residents ask “where is that?” when we mention it.

So whether, like Brigadoon, the Elsie Street Library Main Branch has always been there, or just appeared on certain days, to certain people, I can’t say for sure.

I walk the street all the time. I’m always looking at the houses and the flowers, seeing the paint colors and street plantings. I can’t tell you for sure when the elves set up this library, but we’ve never seen it before. I love it!

PHOTO: Neighbor Sharon

Woman Found Dead in Minivan at Safeway Parking Lot

/ Todd_Lappin / 10 Comments

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A strange and upsetting story unfolded yesterday afternoon at the Taoist Safeway on Mission Street. A woman was found dead in her car in the Safeway parking lot.

Neighbor Valerie was on the scene, and she says foul play does not appear to have been a factor:

I went to Safeway around 1 pm. I was driving in. and there were a ton of SFPD and SFFD cars/trucks that had just pulled into the parking lot. They went over to an older minivan that was parked on the right side (next to the taqueria), and the paramedics appeared to be attending to someone.

When I was checking out, I could see that there were still several cops/cars hanging out near the van, but all the fire department trucks and the ambulance were gone.

I asked the cashier what was going on. She said someone had died in their car. Apparently the woman was known to the Safeway staff; she went in often to eat samples and then would go into her van to sleep for a few hours. It is possible that the deceased was there for a full day.

Eventually, someone decided to call the cops and found the unfortunate scene. As I was leaving, they had it blocked off with crime scene tape.

PHOTO: Bernal Safeway from Bernal Heights, by Thomas Hawk

Sunday: Artist Performance Will Focus on Alex Nieto Shooting

/ Todd_Lappin / 1 Comment

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Megan Lavelle emailed Bernalwood this week to invite our community to a performance dedicated to the officer-involved shooting of Bernal resident Alex Nieto. Megan writes:

I am the Assistant Curator for Manresa Gallery, a contemporary art gallery inside St. Ignatius Church on the USF campus. This Sunday, April 13th we will be hosting a performance by artist Amitis Motevalli titled “I Speak of Shards and Pebbles.” To quote the artist:

‘“I Speak of Shards and Pebbles” uses documented accounts of recent incidents of officer involved shootings in and around San Francisco. The artist investigates how victims become dehumanized in their media portrayal. In the tradition of Iranian folklore, Motevalli finds stories by community members and the deceased’s family to create a more human depiction so the state driven narrative is not the only one accessible.’

The performance on Sunday will focus on the recent police shooting of Alex Nieto on Bernal Hill and we are hoping Bernalwood would feature the event on the blog as a way for mourners to find another outlet for their grief.

Again, the event is this Sunday, April 13th, 2014 beginning at 2:15pm inside St. Ignatius Church at the corner of Fulton and Parker in San Francisco.

PHOTO: Alex Nieto via Amitis Motevalli

Bernal Artist Bernie Lubell Unveils Remarkable Wooden Machine That Does Almost Nothing

/ Todd_Lappin / 2 Comments

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Last night, Neigbor Lessley and I left the familiar environs of Bernal Heights to attend the glamorous opening party for Neighbor Bernie Lubell’s massive new solo art installation at Intersection for the Arts downtown.

As you may remember, when we last saw Neighbor Bernie’s new artwork, it was under construction in his garage on Crescent, and it looked like a medieval Rube Goldberg machine built from wood scavenged from a construction site. Very mysterious.

Last night at Intersection for the Arts, the true nature of his project was revealed. It’s called “Why Can’t the First Part of the Second Party  be the Second Part of the First Party?” and when fully assembled, it becomes a series of rope-driven pulleys, gears, and driveshafts fabricated entirely from lumber. The ropes are driven by human-powered pedal-bikes and treadmills, which generate lots of gear-spinning motion — but surprisingly little actual change.

This high effort/outcome ratio very much by design. “It’s a piece about people working together to get nothing to happen,” is how Neighbor Bernie described it last night. The wall text at Neighbor Bernie’s show explained that the piece…

… relies entirely on visitors’ active participation to bring it to life. The interconnected mechanisms provide various ways for participants to cooperate to get nothing to happen and several ways to monitor this nothing as it happens.

It’s extremely complicated, meticulously constructed, somewhat confusing, and completely awesome.

Neighbor Bernie’s exhibition will be at Intersection of the Arts (925 Mission) from now until June 7, so if you find yourself near Mission and Fifth, stop in to check it out. Bernalwood is told he will also give an artist’s talk there on May 10.

Congrats and nice work, Neighbor Bernie!

PHOTOS: Top, Bernie Lubell at his opening last night. All photos by Telstar Logistics

Clever Map Reveals Geography of Bernal Heights Coffee Shops

/ Todd_Lappin / 20 Comments

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Some clever data-visualization geeks at MIT have created a very cool new map that reveals the social geography of San Francisco coffee shops. A Bernalwood-enhanced look at our portion of the map reveals which parts of Bernal align most organically with each of our local coffee shops:

This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in San Francisco and the walking-shed community associated with it.

Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them.

We applied two steps to generate the data displayed by the map. First, we used the Google Places API to locate all coffee shops in a given city. Second, for each point in the map we queried the walking route and distance to its nearest coffee shop using the Google Distance Matrix API.

In the final map the colored areas represent a region which is walkable to a specific coffee shop (within one kilometer or 0.7 miles). The intensity of color at each point indicates its distance from its corresponding coffee shop.

Cool! But not perfect. The map was created by algorithms, not humans. So it reveals the logic of physical proximity, not social preference (thought the two often and naturally overlap). Also, the data might be a little old, because the transformative Cafe St. Jorge on Mission near Cortland is not present.

Nevertheless… cool!  Here’s how all of San Francisco looks without the Bernal annotations:

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Bernal Neighbor’s Essay Ponders Housing Prices, Public Policy, and the Future of San Francisco’s Middle Class

/ Todd_Lappin / 26 Comments

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Neighbor Hina Shah is associate professor at the Golden Gate University School of Law. She rents in the La Lengua Autonomous Zone, on 29th at Mission — for the moment. Her housing situation has been stressful, and she wrote about that, and some possible solutions, in last Friday’s Chronicle:

The discussion about the housing crisis has focused exclusively on how the burgeoning tech industry is affecting low-income residents. However, middle-class, moderate-income families like mine are also being squeezed out of the city.

My family lives in a non-rent-controlled unit in the Mission-Bernal Heights district. My husband and I moved into our apartment 10 years ago, when we were still dating. Since then, we got married and had two children. When it was time for our daughter to go to elementary school, we chose our neighborhood public school. We occasionally considered buying a place but, with our incomes as nonprofit and public-sector workers, owning seemed like a financial stretch.

In January, however, our commitment to raising our children in the city was severely tested. We were notified that our rent would increase by $600 a month.

So what is to be done? Neighbor Hina proposes:

To ensure economic diversity in our communities, the city must embrace nonmarket solutions, such as:

Increase city-owned land that can be developed into subsidized housing for all income levels. Vienna offers an excellent model for how San Francisco could be a major player in social housing. In Vienna, the city controls 25 percent of the housing stock and indirectly controls another quarter of housing built and owned by limited-profit, private developers. Housing cannot be controlled solely by the private market, as irrational exuberance is once again overvaluing housing and pushing long-term residents out of the city. Here in San Francisco, the city must become a key player by owning and managing housing stock.

San Francisco’s Housing Trust Fund should be used to build affordable housing units, with a mix of diverse price points, limited equity units and rental units.

Induce tech giants such as Google to invest in community land trusts or other funds to help build more affordable housing. Google’s recent gift to fund free Muni passes for youth for two years is inconsequential. The public and the city officials who represent us should demand more from our tech neighbors.

Preserve and expand rent control: Units constructed after 1979 (like mine) are exempt from rent control. The state’s Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act exempts from rent control single-family homes and condominiums where the tenancy began on or after January 1996. The act also removed vacancy controls, allowing landlords to set new rents when a unit becomes vacant.

Change the Ellis Act to stop speculator evictions of rent-controlled tenants. Preserving and expanding rent control will need full public engagement and the city’s muscle, as it did in 1979 when the city passed emergency legislation to stem the tide of quadrupling rents in the Mission District.

There’s a lot to consider in all this, so discuss in the comments if you’re so inclined.

PHOTO: Telstar Logistics

Visiting British Tourist Gets the Full Bernal Love

/ Todd_Lappin / 3 Comments

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Nice work, people.

Last week, we asked all of you to extend a warm welcome to Tony Quarrington, a British tourist and San Franciscophile who is vacationing in Bernal Heights.

This week, Tony reports that he’s definitely experienced the Bernal love:

It started within minutes of leaving the cottage on our first morning back in the city.

As we crossed Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights to indulge in a Progressive Grounds brunch, an elderly woman walking her dog launched a cheery “hello British people” in our direction. No sooner had we digested this unexpected salutation than she had moved on her way, satisfied, I hope, that she had made us feel immediately at home in the neighborhood.

And, less than a week later, that feeling has only grown progressively stronger.

I suspect that it has been partly fuelled by a request from the moderator of the Bernalwood website and associated Facebook page to make us feel welcome if we were spotted out and about.

If so, it has certainly worked!

But the reaction has still been remarkable. I feel like a minor celebrity every time I step out of the cottage.

But I think it has more do with the fact that the people in this neighborhood are just so nice and welcoming.

Yesterday, a woman leaned out of her car window as she pulled up at Cortland and Ellsworth and called out:

“Hey, are you the British guy?”

As I stood in my Grateful Dead t-shirt taking photographs of a sign explaining how to dispose of your dog poop, all I could muster in my surprise was:

“Is it that obvious?”.

But by this time she had moved away, though not without a friendly wave.

Perhaps she had recognized me from photographs.

Or rather assumed that the clichéd touristy garb and eccentric behavior had me clearly marked down as a crazy limey.

Either way, I was grateful (no pun intended).

Tony and his wife are here all this week as well, so… you know what to do.