robblack2006.com Blog

I was very honored to receive Mayor Gavin Newsom’s endorsement for supervisor on Sunday.

For the announcement, Mayor Newsom joined me and the Tehama Street Neighborhood Association in painting a mural incorporating the faces of all the children who live on the street. The neighbors have been working on the mural for serveral weeks, and we were adding the final touches. The Tehama neighbors are doing everything they can to make their City a safe, beautiful place for their families. It was great to raise awareness of their efforts and to help with a little painting.

An officer from San Francisco Animal Care and Control spoke at the Treasure Island community meeting on Wednesday night. It was nice of the officer to make the trip out since there is no budget for Animal Care and Control officers to work on Treasure Island. Neither the Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) nor the Board of Supervisors bothered to budget for Treasure Island to received basic enforcement from the department. They will only come out to the island if there is an actively aggressive animal reported. For cases of animal abuse, well, I guess Fido just has to take it.

It is an ongoing shame that Supervisor Daly, the chair of the Budget committee and member of the TIDA board, has not ensured that San Francisco residents on Treasure Island receive the same level of services as other neighborhoods in the City.

Joe Dignan was memorialized today at St. Brigid’s church, an incredible landmark that he fought for years to preserve. Through his selfless fight to save St. Brigid, Joe felt closer to God and to his community, and we were blessed to have become closer to him. Thank you Joe.

McCoppin Street 

Hats off to Karen Miller and her many neighbors and friends for putting together a great event for “The Hub”. The music was great, and the fashions being shown by the Porcelynne Boutique and Gallery were fantastic. It was beautiful day to spend outside, getting to know people and listening to same great live music.
For more on the “porcelynne” style, check out their website at www.porcelynne.com.

Howard Langton Garden Tex / Mex BBQ
On Sunday night, I hit the Howard Langton Garden Tex / Mex BBQ and potluck in SOMA. The Howard Langton Garden is an amazing oasis. It is a beautiful space to relax, surrounded by green plants, herbs and vegetables grown by residents of the community. The potluck was complete with country music and sangria. My contribution to the festivities was a pecan pie, made from pecan’s from my families orchard in New Mexico. (I am proud to say that the pie was the first thing eaten at the party!)
While at the BBQ, I met a wonderful man who had helped prepare the habanera chicken and pork kabobs. He had arrived in San Francisco three years ago, homeless and in need of a helping hand. He found one at Episcopal Community Services, where he enrolled in their CHEFS class. The CHEFS (Conquering Homelessness Through Employment in Food Services) is a vocational training program that helps homeless and formerly homeless individuals find work in the food services industry. Through the program, he learned how to prepare (tasty I might add) meals for up to 300 people at a time.
Now, three years later, he helps cook for hundreds of people a day and helps teach new classes in the CHEFS program. Episcopal Community Services is doing more than handing out bread and fishes, they are teaching people how to fish.

For more about the CHEFS program checkout http://www.ecs-sf.org/chefsnewsletter.pdf, for more about the Howard Langton Garden see http://www.howardlangtongarden.org/

The Metropolitan – Saturday night was a wonderful opportunity to talk to the residents of The Metropolitan on 1st Street.Phil, the organizer of a wonderful potluck, was kind enough to let me crash the event and talk to some of the residents. It was a great crowd of young professionals, artists, and families. I met a group of great guys who recently started a great new local clothing company called “Artificial Flavor”, an underwear designer so you have high-end fashion for your backend - http://www.aflavor.com/, a very cool new San Francisco small business. In case you missed it, Artificial Flavor was featured in the Sunday, July 16 Date Section of The Chronicle.

The concerns of most of the people I spoke to at the Metropolitan focused on issues around safety and services. Many of the residents said that they did not feel safe walking around their neighborhood at night. Part of the reason is the lack of neighborhood serving retail and restaurants in the area. If there were more people on the streets in the neighborhood, then everyone would feel safer being out.

As we plan to build more housing, especially in the South of Market, we must also plan to build, promote, and sustain more small businesses in these Neighborhoods. Housing alone does not create a livable neighborhood. Our neighborhoods are defined by the activities we do outside of our homes, by where we go to meet friends, to have coffee, to have a drink, to pick up our dry cleaning. It is these small businesses in the neighborhoods that will increase foot traffic and help promote a safer, more vibrant quality of life.

Welcome to the Rob Black for Supervisor Blog.   Running for Supervisor over the last few months has been an amazing experience.  Not so much for the events or the speeches, but because of the people I have had the opportunity to meet.  I have had the chance, to sit in dozens of people’s living rooms and talk about their hopes, their dreams, and where they want their neighborhood and their City to go. They have talked about what inspires them, frustrates them, and makes them laugh.    I look forward to sharing with you my experiences on the campaign trail, as well as the lives and stories of the people of District 6.