Archive for the ‘Gentrification’ Category
Remembering the 15-Third
In April, after construction delays and budget overruns, Muni, at long last, inaugurated its newest rail line, the T-Third Street. Advertised as “Connecting People, Connecting Communities”, the T-Third Street is an investment in some of San Francisco’s long-overlooked communities, particularly the humbler Bayview and Visitacion Valley neighborhoods, in the southeastern corner of the city — a place many people in the Bay Area and even San Francisco know only through the Chronicle’s homicide reports. The line provides direct rail service from downtown to the 3rd Street corridor, as well as to the UCSF Mission Bay campus and the new neighborhood that will surround the campus some years in the future. Solely from the perspective of transit service, the 3rd Street corridor should not have been given first priority for a rail line, but the T-Third project demonstrates a tangible and substantial investment in troubled neighborhoods, making it an excellent political tool. Back in April, the SFMTA held an opening ceremony in which city supervisors, “Da (Old) Mayor” Willie Brown (who spoke because the project was studied and developed under his watch), and even Madam Speaker Pelosi, in a grand sort of “Kumbaya”, pontificated about the deep symbolism of the new line and how it would help usher in a new era for the neglected southeastern neighborhoods. The transition from the old 15-Third bus to the new T-Third rail line became a metaphor for the future promise held by the 3rd Street corridor — promise which the T-Third would itself encourage and help to cultivate.
