WTF SF?
La vida loca en La Playa, but don't ever complain to the "authorities."
In the “no good deed goes unpunished” category, what’s going on down on La Playa Street in the Outer Sunset — Life on La Playa — especially in the block between Lincoln Way and Irving, is a top-of-the-charts pile of bullshit.
As previously reported — Life on La Playa — in July of 2025 a core group of residents on that block of La Playa Street raised concerns about a half-baked new idea from SFMTA and SF Public Works (DPW) to change the long-established street sweeping schedule for that block to an absurd, 6 hour, middle-of-the-night shift. Locals preferred the previous schedule and they told their Supervisor (the erstwhile Supervisor Joe Engardio) their thoughts on the matter.
The now-recalled Supervisor made a couple of calls, and DPW and SFMTA in their infinite pettiness and stupidity, pulled the “No Parking — street sweeping…” signs altogether and promptly ceased all regular street sweeping activity. That highly-punitive decision has continued for nearly nine months, with no regularly scheduled street sweeping since that time.
Recently, I have been helping local residents raise up their voices again with City Hall, in hopes that they can be seen and heard over the sand and garbage piling up on the streets, in the gutters and on the sidewalks. The city continues to behave like a gaggle of petulant children, worse than that actually; that comparison is an unkindness to petulant children.
By the way, street sweeping and sand clearing in this neighborhood is an important activity, not to be taken away lightly. Wind blown sand piles up quickly there because of the close proximity to Ocean Beach. Asking for regularly scheduled street sweeping is eminently reasonable.
After quite a bit of drum-beating, City crews showed up last week, moved some sand, cleared some sidewalks, cleared out around the Taco Truck and an automated e-bike rental rack and then took a break for a week. Oh, they also drove a street sweeper down the street at 3:00 a.m. one morning (perhaps a little bit spiteful but not as much as taking a break for a week). The last few days a crew picked up garbage strewn about the area, not all of it, just some of it. They bagged it up and left it street-side at the curb.
I guess that’s what I would expect, since they moved all the swept and shoveled sand curbside as well.
Oops, missed a spot fellas.
Jen Dougherty, who lives on the block summed it all up pretty well when she told me:
“I don’t understand why it is so difficult to put us back in the street sweeping schedule. $&@+, the poles are still there. Streets around us get cleaned or at least don’t have what we have. It should not take from 3/23-4/3 M-F to clear sand.
People just parked on the sand that was shoveled and swept to curbside. The noise, garbage and parking is a joke as well.”
Then she went out and shot a picture of the garbage truck that was called to pick up the garbage collected by the City crew, which stopped right beside the four bags full of trash, sitting there for 5 minutes (another break for coffee and a sandwich maybe). And then Dougherty shot a video of the garbage truck driving away without picking up so much as a single bag of garbage, or anything else.
A resident of The Richmond told me recently — in a conversation about Prop A and the earthquake safety Boondoggle bond (Vote No on A!) — that over at City Hall they think of us that live out here as “living in the County” and they refer to us and our western and southern neighborhoods as being “in the County.” I guess that means we don’t matter as much, if at all. As my interviewed Richmond resident said, “if we’re in ‘the County’ then we don’t count,” not to them anyway.
I think that there are quite a few of us unwashed “County-folk” out here in The Sunset as well as all the other western and southern neighborhoods, that are a lot smarter than the City Hall folk think.
Moreover, we mean to have the final word on all of this bullshit.
We’ll see… we’ll see… Vote No on Prop A so we can have Equal Fire Protection for All the residents of the City AND County of San Francisco, that’ll be a big stride toward being heard. And the people I know on La Playa, we have a few ideas about being heard on these other matters, I’ll be sure to let you all know how that turns out.
[for more about the saga of La vida loca en La Playa, check out the story below — Manifesting Destiny]