-- president adam [stph-fplz/] yes. >> commissioner dooley? >> yes. >> commissioner dwight? >> yes. >> commissioner brien is absent, commissioner ortiz-cartagena is absent. commissioner white? >> yes. >> commissioner yee riley? >> yes. >> that passes 5-0. >> thank you. next item, please >> commissioners that brings us up to all right 4 presentation and discussion on the mayor's invest in neighborhood program by jordan klein, office of economic and workforce development. >> welcome, jordan. >> thank you. good afternoon commissioners. thank you very much, jordan klein with the office of economic and workforce development. here to tell you about investment in neighborhoods which was actually referenced

multiple times in the last preparation. i want to thank you for your time this afternoon. i know i have spoken to self of you individually about this program, but i think it's great to have the opportunity to present to the commission and i also want to acknowledge commissioner yee riley, who last summer served on the working group, the investment in neighborhoods working group, that helps to oversee the creation of this program. do you have my presentation in front of you? okay, great. i'm going to give you an overview of the program. the elements, the baseline services, the commercial district assessment and customized services and do some q&a. so essentially the mission of this program is our neighborhood commercial districts will thrive and it's born out of the mayor's commitment to economic development as a central

platform of his administration. at the end of 2011, after he was elected to a full term, he directed our office to greatly expand the scope of our neighborhood economic development work. so we have been doing neighborhood economic development for years at oewds's economic development division and invest in neighborhoods represents an expansion in that work. i will tell you how it's different. a bunch of new things have happened, but we have done a way better job in partnering with other city agencies in leveraging resources to help neighborhoods and i think you just heard a great example of that. so this is where we're piloting the program in 25 neighborhood commercial district across the city. i will give you a handout at the end of the presentation that has this map. historically, we have worked in ten neighborhoods, ncd neighborhood commercial district across the city and

this is a substantial expansion from 10 to 25 and this list was created based on feedback from the community stakeholders, the district supervisors and the mayor. so i want to talk to you about the theory in invest in neighborhoods and what makes up a healthy commercial district? obviously you want existing businesses to thrive and really meet the needs of local residents. you want attractive physical conditions, good-looking facades and trees high-quality of high, public safety and public health issues and we want community-based entitis that can advocate for their neighborhoods and can implement neighborhood improvement projects like merchants associations or also cbds. and there are so many city services that are related to

these characteristics of healthy commercial districts and obviously oewd has a lot of services, but dph, dpw, et cetera there are so many city entitis that are deploying resources around commercial district in the city. one of my colleagues might go down to bayview to meet with merchants and find out that dpw was there the week before meeting with the merchants. so when we don't work together as effectively as we can, we sometimes duplicate each other's work or missing opportunities to leverage investment. so invest in neighborhoods is at its core, it's a framework for more effective deployment of city resources by organizing city departments so that we work together more effectively to respond to the specific needs and opportunities in each commercial district.

that is "invest in neighborhoods." and i will tell you how we do that. there is basically three elements to invest in neighborhoods that i want to tell you about. baseline services, commercial district assessments and customized services. so "baseline" services are city programs that are available to all of the neighborhoods in invest in neighborhoods, where we're piloting the initiative. and i have a few up on the screen there that i'm going to quickly run through, but we have identified about 40 city services that we call "baseline services." any neighborhood, commercial district or small business can access these services. so oewd staff support and we have somebody in our invest in neighborhoods team identified as the liaison or point person for each of the 25 participating commercial districts. i am the point person for the excelsior and middle polk. jorge, who you just heard from in the last presentation is the

point person for west portal and commercial districts in the sunset district. you might know chrissy, who is the point person for bayview and portola and it goes on, so each neighborhood has an advocate in city hall and it's really important, that advocate is staying on top of what is happening in the neighborhood and working with the agencies to get the district the support it needs. the job squad, for the first time, we have -- we have two guys who are pounding the pavement, conducting proactive outreach to small businesses around the city. sometimes we acknowledge that not everybody is going to walk down to city hall and come to the small business assistance center and talk to chris and regina and jane. there are a whole lot of business openers owners who are just going to stay many their business and maybe the

only interaction they have with city hall is getting their tax bill and we want to change that so we're sending city staff out to connect them or even at the department of the environment, whatever services are most relevant to those businesses. so that is the job squad. storefront sf is our new web platform to track vacancies. so we're tracking retail vacancies all around the city. if you go storefrontsf.com, i was able to pop up the site. for each listing we have contact info, we have photos and we have more information.

this is a brand-new program. we're really excited about it. we have gotten a lot of positive feedback from brokers, from small business owners and entrepreneurs who are looking for space. and so again, that is part of baseline services. we're trying to is deploy that in all 25 invest in neighborhoods corridors. we have a mini grant program, making small grants to neighborhood-based groups to implement neighborhood improvement projects. we have new loan products and we have community capacity-building projects. with training and workshops for neighborhood advocates, a merchant association leader who really wants to make a change in their neighborhood. i could give you an hour just on this one slide, but i'm not going to. i'm going to keep moving. that is "baseline services." so we're trying to get those is deployed to all of these 25 neighborhoods. the next element is "commercial district assessment." so the

planning department and our office partnered and conducted a great deal of research on all 25 of these neighborhoods. it included looking at physical conditions, demographics, economic analysis. we looked at the vacancy rates and sales tax trends over time. does the neighborhood have a merchants association? do they have a neighborhood association? do they have a cbd? we conducted stakeholder interviews and surveys. from all of that information and research, we are creating a profile, a snapshot of current conditions for each of these neighborhoods. i left my snapshot of the lower 24th neighborhood district on my desk, but they include maps

of neighborhood assets and specific strengths and challenges in each neighborhood. a list of the key partners in each neighborhood. it's a treasure trove of information. we have released at this point nine of them at oewd.org. we're distributing them to neighborhood partners, gathering feedback. i hope to have all 25 of them done this summer. and these are intended really twofold. no. 1 to be a resource for community members who are really stakeholders for these communitis and no. 2 they are intended to inform the deployment of city resources and the resources of our partners as well. because based on results of these assessments we're going to create a customized plan for each of the 25 neighborhoods. this slide is a map of the process by which we're going to come up with this plan. so you see it starts in the upper left with the assessment. based on all of that analysis, our team of oewd staff working

with our partners and other city agencies are going to come up some ideas, just a list of ideas. how could we respond to these conditions on the ground? what should we be deploying? based on all the tools that we have in our toolkit? and keep in mind, what are the economic needs? what existing social capital is there in the community for us to work with? what opportunities for economic growth are there? based on that, we're going to come up with a draft plan that we review with three very important stakeholder groups. first of all is of course the community. and that might entail one-on-one stakeholder interviews that might mean community meetings, focus groups. i know for example, tonight there is a community meeting on lower 24th street to talk about their draft, customized plan. so working closely with community members and you know, wherever we can -- wherever

this can be driven by community members we want that to happen. we would much rather see a merchant's association driving this work than city hall driving it. realistically there is not going to be that level of capacity in all the 25 neighborhoods. but where there is that capacity, we really want to leverage it and lean on these community partners and make it happen of we're also working very closely with the district supervisors relevant to each of the neighborhoods and finally making sure that we get all the right city people in the room. the the customized service tools are some of the tools that oewd is deploying, but in a lot of cases they are resourced by other city agencies. in the excelsior, they need a

streetscape plan and need investment in a streetscape overhaul and there been the planning department and dpw and mta that are going to be the prime drivers of, not oewd, but my role as the point person for the excelsior at oewd is kind of making sure that that happens. so customized service plans. we'll have 25 customized service plans, one for each of these neighborhoods later this year that will definitely inform the mayor's budget priorities and it's going to inform how we do things here. so a couple of examples of "customized services." that healthy retailer program you just heard about. that is a new tool in our toolkit that we're really excited to deploy and the thing about customized services these are the things that will not be deployed in every neighborhood. in part because we don't have the neighborhood and also not every neighborhood needs a healthy retailer program. if there is a food desert, they need it, but if there are a bunch of grocery stores and

produce markets we won't deploy that. historically we used a little bit of cookie-cutter approach, but since we're expanding our geographic focus, we're responding to specific needs in each neighborhood. a couple of examples of is ss shines and the community-based corridors, which has led to the creation of cbds, which is great. our ada program. and a few others, but also as i mentioned we're also working with these other city agencies. this is just random examples of other city services that we're going to is deploy as customized services in the neighborhoods, but we actually have a list of over 100 different services in our

toolkit that we're going deploy strategically. right now we're finishing the neighborhood profiles to develop and implement customized plans and identify benchmarks for achievement and then for some of these neighborhoods, graduate them from the program. so that we can cycle through other neighborhoods and make it a citywide program eventually. and then we're working with the controller's office to develop a plan to evaluate the initiative and identify specific quantitative and qualitative metrics that we use to see how we're doing. and refine the program accordingly. so i am happy to take your questions. i know that was a lot of material that i just threw at you. we would love it if you would follow us on twitter and we have a newsletter that we just launched a couple of months ago. so if you want to keep

track of what we're doing, and we really appreciate your support. >> commissioners, any questions for jordan? commissioner riley? >> jordan, congratulations. you make excellent powerpoint graphs and so happy to see the end result, so much more than when i started with the group at the beginning. i remember we were at a outreach committee and commissioner dooley and i were trying to tackle the vacancy situation and we actually took a camera to go to different neighborhoods to take pictures and all of that. so with your automatic tracking system, it's really helpful. so do you have any like ballpark number of how many vacancies in the city? >> well we have 130 listings, and storefrontsf.com right now.

we're listing all of the retail vacancies currently available for lease, some of them for purchase. it's actually indicated whether it's "lease/purchase," or both in some cases. so we have about 130/135 and most of those are within our invest in neighborhood-commercial districts. so we're trying to track all of them within our 25 corridors and then anyone who wants to post a vacancy, citywide, no matter where it is, they can post them there. so we have a number that are from outside of the area. so the greater challenge are the vacancies that aren't available for lease and there are a number of reasons why they are not available for lease. a non-conforming use like storage or housing. in some cases, the space is not up to code, either it requires,

i don't know, ada or electrical or plumbing upgrades that the owner is unabe unable or unwilling to make, sometimes just because the project doesn't pencil. the return on the lease the numbers just don't add up. you know, then we also hear reports and concerns about speculation. so people holding out for higher rents and absentee landlords who just aren't possible to get a hold of, and so the space remains. so right now we don't have great numbers about how widespread that problem really is, either of those two problems that i just mentioned. that is one reason we have storefrontsf up and running so it will form polices on what we can do to address those issues.

you know, i would say that 130, we have -- an average we have about 4, 5 vacancies in each of our 25 commercial districts. those are the ones that are listed and available. i would say and this is really off the top of my head, but for every vacancy listed, there is another one that isn't, i would say. so extrapolate that number and if i had to guess, 300, around city, maybe. >> that kind of makes sense. thank you. >> commissioner dooley. >> actually i was going to bring up the long-term vacancies also, because i consider it one of the biggest blight problems in all of our neighborhoods and when we worked on this, there are a lot

of them and many them have been closed for 25 years. so i am hoping that you guys start to think about a way to address that long-term blight. my other question is, so have all 25 neighborhoods been contacted by their community outreach person? >> well, when you say "how do you contact a neighborhood?" i think that is a great question. we do have staff, each of the liaisons, if there is a neighborhood association, or a merchants association, or a cbd, they have definitely made that contact. >> you might want to check on that, by the way okay. >> because i am the president of the north beach business association and no contact. so just fyi, you know? maybe it's just us, but you think it's great to let all the merchant associations in on this. >> right. >> and get them involved. >> so we have been working

with michelle thomas, who i know sometimes participates in those meetings, but i will make sure our liaison from north beach gets in touch. >> any other commissioner comments? i just want to say this is great. this is very great and i have been involved a little bit with the storefrontsf project and jordan, you have done a great job with that and the brokers have all over the community like it as well. what i like best about it, they have lists out there already, but they are all paid. you get a few for free and they tease you with five free, but this is a very, very good tool, that i think will really help take care of a lot of vacancy problems in neighborhoods. we tried it in upper market, in castro about six, seven years ago. and we filled -- we almost go

to 100 fill, because we had a couple of those, you know, legacy ones i will call them, vacancis that you will never change. and i do know you guys did do outreach to merchants of upper market and castro. and i like this program. i love the job squad. i love the fact that you are out there in the sup sunset and jorge is out there doing the outreach. if you are around city hall it's easy to get your permits, but if you have the job squad out in the excelsior neighborhood and it has a huge impact on the business owner. so i think you are doing a marvelous job launching this and i have nothing, but praise for you on this program. thank you. >> thank you very much, commissioners. i wanted to say that chris has a handout that reiterates a lot

of the stuff that i went over today. i would love any additional feedback you have how to reach out to stakeholders and business owners and i would be interested in coming back for a status report. >> commissioners included in your binder is the matrix of neighborhood and who the oewd staff contact is for each neighborhood. >> with that, do we have any members of the public who would like to make a comment on the invest in neighborhoods program, item no. 4? seeing none, public comment is closed. thank you very much, jordan. this was awesome and good job. >> thank you >> thank you. >> next item. >> commissioners, i. 5,. >> jorge, good job, too. he is back

you have to acknowledge jorge. >> item 5 presentation and discussion on the giant sweep program by the department of public works presentation by rachel gordon department of public works. >> thank you, commissioners. so i want to talk to you about the giant sweep campaign. i am rachel gordon with dpw and this is something that mayor lee with the san francisco giants launched, so people keep the city clean. we have actually had a lot of success in the past few months in what we're doing. we're really trying to engage school-aged children from the elementary schools to high school to start thinking about how to keep san francisco clean and beautiful. so we do everything from school curriculum to doing hands-on activities with the kids and go

out there and picking up garbage in a safe manner. we had a poster contest with more than 300 submissions from 22 schools and work with the department of environment, with the san francisco municipal transportation agency, with recreation and park department, with the public utilities commission. really all hands-on by city departments, really to just get people to start thinking about taking care of the city, not having it where we have kind of a valet garage pickup by dpw and this is a way that people and corporations can get involved. we have four main giant sweep days in the city all tied to the san francisco giant's schedule. we just had our last one last weekend, where we had tabling at at&t park. hunter pence the right fielder for the giants has done an

announcement saying that this is a city that we all have a stake in and one reason we teamed up with the giants on this, they had a really good message last year when they won the world series. that it wasn't one person who won the world series. it wasn't just one superstar, buster posey or sandoval that it was a team for the for everyone to pitch in. this is really a sponsor-funded campaign. we're looking at it for a three-year campaign. so far we have had success in getting partnership. we have our commercial corridor workers doing outreach with the businesses and not just how to keep the storefronts clean, but also asking people to put the posters up. we have had more than 11,000 people sign the giant sweep of pledge and i hope each of you commissioners will considersiping it as well.

it's very simple things like put the trash in the right-colored bin. if you are on a muni bus, leave your packaging on the bus. if you see someone vandalizing with graffiti or illegally dumping mattresses on the street, call 311 or 911. we just want people to start getting engaged in how we take care of our city. those are the basics of the campaign. i am happy to answer any questions, if you have them. >> any commissioner comments? commissioner dooley. >> great job. thank you very much. i think it's always great to team with the giants, because they are so popular and everybody loves them. >> do you think they are more popular than city government? >> ? [ laughter ] >> i'm into not sure. >> thank you for listening to us. we want to get the word out and one reason we do the pledge,

besides people signing up we have email blasts and programs for kids. we have a baseballs to give away, baseball tickets to give away, t-shirts and hats to make it fun for people to take care of the city. thank you for the opportunity. >> commissioner riley. >> i like the idea of having people to sign the pledge to not litter, because i always wonder, if people don't litter, we don't have to sweep. >> that is exactly right. we have a mindset that has happened with san francisco in public works, we pick up 30,000 gallons of trash and we'll continue to pick it up, but wasn't to get it to the point that people don't toss it down in the first place. the bottom line is working with kids. we have had phenomenal response from the 6,7, 8 and 9 years old going from 2nd grade up, 1st grade up really with this

campaign. we have our own mascot, not lucile, but sweepy as well. sfgiants.org in people are interested, and we're really getting rolling on this. thank you for your time. >> any other commissioner comments? >> i would like to say thank you very much for coming. i am actually the one that requested that you come today. and i did sign the pledge. and i also took the graffiti watch classes and i'm actually almost out of all of my cleaning stuff. >> we'll make sure that you get some, commissioner. >> i am on the list, which i do like, but i want to thank you for this. this is so important especially this time of year and with america's cup coming up. it's one of the things that i used to push when i was with the castro merchants was get

out there and sweep in front of your store. because we have people coming from all over the world to this city and we're known for being a very clean city, but it takes an effort to do that. i really appreciate that and people will watch this on tv and i will encourage everyone watching this on tv to go and sign up for the giant sweep and actually sweep. and don't sweep it in the street. one thing i learned in the training, people think into the streets thinking that the street cleaners pick it up and that is not cool. sweep it into a dust pan and put it in a receptacle. >> the department of public works is there to help, if you need brooms or pickers or you want to do a special event with a merchant corridor, we're happy to help you with that. we have got the tools to help san franciscans whether it's businesses or residents, communy