>> there is a lot of unique characteristics about visitation valley. it is a unique part of the city. >> we are off in a corner of the city against the san francisco county line 101 on one side. vis station valley is still one of the last blue color neighborhoods in san francisco. a lot of working class families out here. it is unusual. not a lot of apartment

buildings. a lot of single family homes. >> great business corridor. so much traffic coming through here and stopping off to grab coffee or sandwich or pick up food before going home. >> a lot of customers are from the neighborhood. they are painters or mechanics. they are like blue color workers, a lot of them. >> the community is lovely. multi-racial and hopefully we can look out for each other. >> there is a variety of businesses on the block. you think of buffalo kitchen, chinese food, pork buns, sandwich. library, bank of america with a parking lot. the market where you can grab anything. amazing food choices, nail salons. basically everything you need is here. >> a lot of these businesses up and down leland are family

owned. people running them are family. when you come here and you have an uncle and nephew and go across the street and have the guy and his dad. lisa and her daughter in the dog parlor and pam. it is very cool. >> is small businesses make the neighborhood unique. >> new businesses coming. in mission blue, gourmet chocolate manufacturing. the corridor has changed and is continuing to change. we hope to see more businesses coming in the near future. >> this is what is needed. first, stay home. unless it is absoluteliness scary. social distancing is the most important step right now to

limit spread of virus. cancel all nonessential gather everythings. >> when the pandemic litly land avenue suffered like other corridors. a few nail salons couldn't operate. they shut down. restaurants that had to adapt to more of a take out model. they haven't totally brought back indoor seating. >> it is heartbreaking to see the businesses that have closed down and shut because of the pandemic. >> when the pandemic first hit it got really slow. we had to change our hours. we never had to close, which is a blessing. thank god. we stayed open the whole time. >> we were kind of nervous and anxious to see what was going to come next hoping we will not have to close down. >> during covid we would go outside and look on both sides of the street.

it looked like old western town. nobody on the street. no cars. >> it was a hard eight or nine months. when they opened up half the people couldn't afford a haircut. >> during that time we kept saying the coffee shop was the living room of the valley. people would come to make sure they were okay. >> we checked on each other and patronized each other. i would get a cup of coffee, shirt, they would get a haircut. >> this is a generous and kind community. people would be like i am getting the toffee for the guy behind me and some days it went on and on. it was amazing to watch. we saw a perfect picture of community. we are all in this together. >> since we began to reopen one year later, we will emerge

stronger. we will emerge better as a city because we are still here and we stand in solidarity with one another. >> when we opened up august 1st. i will not say it was all good. we are still struggling due to covid. it affected a lot of people. >> we are still in the pandemic right now. things are opening up a little bit. it is great to have space to come together. i did a three painting series of visitation valley and the businesses on leland. it felt good to drop off the paintings and hung them. >> my business is picking up. the city is opening up. we have mask requirements. i check temperatures. i ask for vaccination card and/or recent test. the older folks they want to feel safe here. >> i feel like there is a sense

of unity happening. >> what got us through the pandemic was our customers. their dogs needed groomed, we have to cut their nails so they don't over grow. >> this is only going to push us forward. i sense a spirit of community and just belief in one another. >> we are trying to see if we can help all small businesses around here. there is a cannabis club lounge next to the dog parlor to bring foot traffic. my business is not going to work if the business across the street is not getting help. >> in hit us hard. i see a bright future to get the storefronts full. >> once people come here i think they really like it. >> if you are from san francisco visit visitation valley to see how this side of the city is the same but different.

>> we are right now in outer richmond in the last business area of this city. this area of merchants is in the most western part of san francisco, continue blocks down the street they're going to fall into the pacific ocean. two blocks over you're going to have golden gate park. there is japanese, chinese, hamburgers, italian, you don't have to cook. you can just walk up and down the street and you can get your cheese. i love it. but the a very multicultural place with people from everywhere. it's just a wonderful environment. i love the richmond district.

>> and my wife and i own a café we have specialty coffee drinks, your typical lattes and mochas and cappuccinos, and for lunches, sandwiches and soup and salad. made fresh to order. we have something for everybody >> my shop is in a very cool part of the city but that's one of the reasons why we provide such warm and generous treats, both physically and emotionally (♪♪) >> it's an old-fashioned general store. they have coffee. other than that what we sell is fishing equipment. go out and have a good time. >> one of my customers that has been coming here for years has always said this is my favorite store. when i get married i'm coming in

your store. and then he in his wedding outfit and she in a beautiful dress came in here in between getting married at lands end and to the reception, unbelievable. (♪♪) >> the new public health order that we're announcing will require san franciscans to remain at home with exceptions only for essential outings. >> when the pandemic first hit we kind of saw the writing on the walls that potentially the city is going to shut all businesses down. >> it was scary because it was such an unknown of how things

were going to pan out. i honestly thought that this might be the end of our business. we're just a small business and we still need daily customers. >> i think that everybody was on edge. nobody was untouched. it was very silent. >> as a business owner, you know, things don't just stop, right? you've still got your rent, and all of the overhead, it's still there. >> there's this underlying constant sense of dread and anxiety. it doesn't prevent you from going to work and doing your job, it doesn't stop you from doing your normal routine. what it does is just make you feel extra exhausted. >> so we began to reopen one year later, and we will emerge

stronger, we will emerge better as a city, because we are still here and we stand in solidarity with one another. >> this place has definitely been an anchor for us, it's home for us, and, again, we are part of this community and the community is part of us. >> one of the things that we strived for is making everyone in the community feel welcome and we have a sign that says "you're welcome." no matter who you are, no matter what your political views are, you're welcome here. and it's sort of the classic san francisco thing is that you work with folks. >> it is your duty to help everybody in san francisco.

>> i view san francisco almost as a sibling or a parent or something. i just love the city. i love everything about it. when i'm away from it, i miss it like a person. i grew up in san francisco kind

of all over the city. we had pretty much the run of the city 'cause we lived pretty close to polk street, and so we would -- in the summer, we'd all all the way down to aquatic park, and we'd walk down to the library, to the kids' center. in those days, the city was safe and nobody worried about us running around. i went to high school in spring valley. it was over the hill from chinatown. it was kind of fun to experience being in a minority, which most white people don't get to experience that often. everything was just really within walking distance, so it make it really fun. when i was a teenager, we didn't have a lot of money. we could go to sam wong's and get super -- soup for $1. my parents came here and were

drawn to the beatnik culture. they wanted to meet all of the writers who were so famous at the time, but my mother had some serious mental illness issues, and i don't think my father were really aware of that, and those didn't really become evident until i was about five, i guess, and my marriage blew up, and my mother took me all over the world. most of those ad ventures ended up bad because they would end up hospitalized. when i was about six i guess, my mother took me to japan, and that was a very interesting trip where we went over with a boyfriend of hers, and he was working there. i remember the open sewers and gigantic frogs that lived in the sewers and things like that. mostly i remember the smells very intensely, but i loved japan. it was wonderful. toward the end. my mother had a breakdown, and

that was the cycle. we would go somewhere, stay for a certain amount of months, a year, period of time, and she would inevitably have a breakdown. we always came back to san francisco which i guess came me some sense of continuity and that was what kept me sort of stable. my mother hated to fly, so she would always make us take ships places, so on this particular occasion when i was, i think, 12, we were on this ship getting ready to go through the panama canal, and she had a breakdown on the ship. so she was put in the brig, and i was left to wander the ship until we got to fluorfluora few days later, where we had a distant -- florida a few days later, where we had a distant cousin who came and got us. i think i always knew i was a writer on some level, but i

kind of stopped when i became a cop. i used to write short stories, and i thought someday i'm going to write a book about all these ad ventures that my mother took me on. when i became a cop, i found i turned off parts of my brain. i found i had to learn to conform, which was not anything i'd really been taught but felt very safe to me. i think i was drawn to police work because after coming from such chaos, it seemed like a very organized, but stable environment. and even though things happening, it felt like putting order on chaos and that felt very safe to me. my girlfriend and i were sitting in ve 150d uvio's bar, and i looked out the window and i saw a police car, and there was a woman who looked like me driving the car. for a moment, i thought i was me. and i turned to my friend and i

said, i think i'm supposed to do this. i saw myself driving in this car. as a child, we never thought of police work as a possibility for women because there weren't any until the mid70's, so i had only even begun to notice there were women doing this job. when i saw here, it seemed like this is what i was meant to do. one of my bosses as ben johnson's had been a cop, and he -- i said, i have this weird idea that i should do this. he said, i think you'd be good. the department was forced to hire us, and because of all of the posters, and the big recruitment drive, we were under the impression that they were glad to have us, but in reality, most of the men did not want the women there. so the big challenge was constantly feeling like you had to prove yourself and feeling like if you did not do a good

job, you were letting down your entire gender. finally took an inspector's test and passed that and then went down to the hall of justice and worked different investigations for the rest of my career, which was fun. i just felt sort of buried alive in all of these cases, these unsolved mysteries that there were just so many of them, and some of them, i didn't know if we'd ever be able to solve, so my boss was able to get me out of the unit. he transferred me out, and a couple of weeks later, i found out i had breast cancer. my intuition that the job was killing me. i ended up leaving, and by then, i had 28 years or the years in, i think. the writing thing really became intense when i was going through treatment for cancer because i felt like there were so many parts that my kids didn't know. they didn't know my story, they didn't know why i had a relationship with my mother, why we had no family to speak of. it just poured out of me. i gave it to a friend who is an

editor, and she said i think this would be publishable and i think people would be interested in this. i am so lucky to live here. i am so grateful to my parents who decided to move to the city. i am so grateful they did. that it never dev mission's goal is aiming to train young adults, youth so we can be a wealth and disparity in underserved communities like where we are today. my name is leo sosa. i'm the founder and executive director for devmission.

we're sitting inside a computer lab where residents come and get support when they give help about how to set up an e-mail account. how to order prescriptions online. create a résumé. we are also now paying attention to provide tech support. we have collaborated with the san francisco mayor's office and the department of technology to implement a broad band network for the residents here so they can have free internet access. we have partnered with community technology networks to provide computer classes to the seniors and the residents. so this computer lab becomes a hub for the community to learn how to use technology, but that's the parents and the adults. we have been able to identify what we call a stem date. the acronym is science

technology engineering and math. kids should be exposed no matter what type of background or ethnicity or income status. that's where we actually create magic. >> something that the kids are really excited about is science and so the way that we execute that is through making slime. and as fun as it is, it's still a chemical reaction and you start to understand that with the materials that you need to make the slime. >> they love adding their little twists to everything. it's just a place for them to experiment and that's really what we want. >> i see. >> really what the excitement behind that is that you're making something. >> logs, legos, sumo box, art, drawing, computers, mine craft, and really it's just awaking opportunity. >> keeping their attention is like one of the biggest challenges that we do have because, you know, they're kids.

they always want to be doing something, be helping with something. so we just let them be themselves. we have our set of rules in place that we have that we want them to follow and live up to. and we also have our set of expectations that we want them to achieve. this is like my first year officially working with kids. and definitely i've had moments where they're not getting something. they don't really understand it and you're trying to just talk to them in a way that they can make it work teaching them in different ways how they can get the light bulb to go off and i've seen it first-hand and it makes me so happy when it does go off because it's like, wow, i helped them understand this concept. >> i love playing games and i love having fun with my friends playing dodge ball and a lot of things that i like. it's really cool. >> they don't give you a lot of

cheese to put on there, do they? you've got like a little bit left. >> we learn programming to make them work. we do computers and programming. at the bottom here, we talk to them and we press these buttons to make it go. and this is to turn it off. and this is to make it control on its own. if you press this twice, it can do any type of tricks. like you can move it like this and it moves. it actually can go like this. >> like, wow, they're just absorbing everything. so it definitely is a

wholehearted moment that i love experiencing. >> the realities right now, 5.3 latinos working in tech and about 6.7 african americans working in tech. and, of course, those tech companies are funders. so i continue to work really hard with them to close that gap and work with the san francisco unified school district so juniors and seniors come to our program, so kids come to our stem hub and be exposed to all those things. it's a big challenge. >> we have a couple of other providers here on site, but we've all just been trying to work together and let the kids move around from each department. some kids are comfortable with their admission, but if they want to jump in with city of dreams or hunter's point, we just try to collaborate to

provide the best opportunity in the community. >> devmission has provided services on westbrook. they teach you how to code. how to build their own mini robot to providing access for the youth to partnerships with adobe and sony and google and twitter. and so devmission has definitely brought access for our families to resources that our residents may or may not have been able to access in the past. >> the san francisco house and development corporation gave us the grant to implement this program. it hasn't been easy, but we have been able to see now some of the success stories of some of those kids that have been able to take the opportunity and continue to grow within their education and eventually become a very successful citizen. >> so the computer lab, they're doing the backpacks.

i don't know if you're going to be able to do the class. you still want to try? . yeah. go for it. >> we have a young man by the name of ivan mello. he came here two and a half years ago to be part of our digital arts music lab. graduating with natural, fruity loops, rhymes. all of our music lyrics are clean. he came as an intern, and now he's running the program. that just tells you, we are only creating opportunities and there's a young man by the name of eduardo ramirez. he tells the barber, what's that flyer? and he says it's a program that teaches you computers and art. and i still remember the day he walked in there with a baseball cap, full of tattoos.

nice clean hair cut. i want to learn how to use computers. graduated from the program and he wanted to work in i.t.. well, eduardo is a dreamer. right. so trying to find him a job in the tech industry was very challenging, but that didn't stop him. through the effort of the office of economic work force and the grant i reached out to a few folks i know. post mates decided to bring him on board regardless of his legal status. he ended his internship at post mates and now is at hudacity. that is the power of what technology does for young people that want to become part of the tech industry. what we've been doing, it's very innovative. helping kids k-12, transitional age youth, families, parents,

communities, understand and to be exposed to stem subjects. imagine if that mission one day can be in every affordable housing community. the opportunities that we would create and that's what i'm trying to do with this >> good morning. the meeting will come to order. welcome to the thursday, may 26, 2022 meeting of the public services and neighborhood services committee. i am gordon mar joined by membe