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Excelsior Land Use Mapping Project
The Excelsior is rich in people, from children to artists, street vendors and day laborers, workers and parents, small business entrepreneurs, elders, and solo cholos making the Excelsior their home away from home. Our commercial corridor is filled with restaurants serving typical foods from our home countries and places to fix a car, buy mangos con chile, wait for a bus, meet up with friends, ride a skateboard, and shop with our families. But, there are many things we do not find in our neighborhood.

Members of our action team Comité AMOR have been transforming themselves into barrio planners. Using a tally sheet and pencil, and bringing the perspective of kids, youth, adults, and elders, they have been looking at familiar spaces in our neighborhood with new eyes. Walking up and down Mission Street, they have been identifying what our city and our private market fail to provide our community. Here’s some highlights:

  • too many parking lots that are aching to be filled up with people, neighborhood services, and community activities
  • too little new housing that is affordable to working families, elders, or homeless people.
  • few spaces to sit down, tell stories, hang out and share our cultures and traditions
  • few plazas, recreational spaces, and family entertainment, or green spaces where we can grow fruits and vegetables to eat and share
  • few community programs and services, such as job training centers, senior centers, childcare facilities, youth programs, and affordable clinics
  • lack of ways for people to make a decent living with healthy and safe job opportunities, and there are empty storefronts with many homegrown entrepreneurs that would love to rent the spaces but cannot afford them.

What our neighborhood lacks in infrastructure, we possess in community talent. Inspired by our barrio planning along Mission Street, PODER held a Movie Night under the Stars at the Ocean Persia triangle in October where we showcased videos by neighborhood youth and provided family friendly movie entertainment. For 2010, we look forward to engaging with our leaders and organizing alongside our community for local, neighborhood scale projects that build our community assets and infrastructure and create a healthy community and local economy.

  

The Economy Through the Voices of Community Members
(this is one of many special features by Sam Brown on building a resilient economy) In an attempt to understand the scope of the economic crisis and explore alternatives for job growth for many affected by this crisis, an interview survey was conducted by PODER recently here in the city of San Francisco primarily with residents that work in the Mission and Excelsior district neighborhoods. Participants were asked a series of questions about how the economy has affected them and what the current conditions look like in this period in time.

Half of all the responses were unemployed while a fifth are part-time workers and a little less than one-third have a full time job. The survey revealed that of those that work most people work about 20 to 40 hours a week while about a quarter of those that are employed worked more than 40 hours a week. Additionally, a majority of participants (approximately 60 percent) reported that they do not make enough to make ends meet. Some of the reasons for lack of employment reveal that almost half of the people in the survey simply cannot find work while about a quarter are studying full time or take care of children. Also, an alarming number of people (three quarters) mentioned they have no savings funds that would help if they lost their job. Survey responses indicated that the most important characteristics for a job were: that a job provides decent wages, health care, and the ability to express a real voice over job and working conditions in addition to an environmentally safe and healthy workplace environment.

Since most of the participants have not participated in a job training programs there is a need to address the scarcity in jobs for many bilingual residents. The survey expressed a need for relevant programs to exist that are oriented to help people find the jobs that they value with characteristics that they find important. Alternatives around some of these issues are important due to the current climate of the job market, which indicates that these issues are not isolated from other services working families are struggling to provide in light of the economic circumstances

 

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