Hayes Valley Fire

On Tuesday morning around 6AM, a large housing construction site at the corner of Octavia and Oak in the Hayes Valley neighborhood went up in flames.

According to a post at SFist, Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association president Jennifer Laska sent a letter a couple of months ago outlining the dangerous situation in the neighborhood: "Hayes Valley has suffered a series of dangerous fires along Octavia Boulevard that started around tent encampments," Laska's letter reads. "There is currently an encampment on Octavia at Hickory where many of these fires have started. [The encampment residents] have been tapping into power at sidewalk utility access points and the light poles along Octavia Boulevard."

The response from San Francisco's municipal bureaucracy and public safety departments has been a collective shrug as if to say, "What do you expect us to do about it?" Since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, the streets of San Francisco, particularly in certain neighborhoods like the Civic Center and environs, have been pockmarked with scenes that look straight out of the latest Netflix dystopian sci-fi series. People dangerously plugging into public utility lines, causing the occasional explosion, along with setting their tents on fire while getting sloppy with drugs, has become a common occurrence.

This isn't a problem that is unique to Hayes Valley or San Francisco. There are just too many people in California with too few affordable housing options. And any municipal response in San Francisco would probably be expensive and fruitless, rather like the current traffic rerouting from the Octavia Street freeway entrances to Page and Haight Streets, causing massive traffic jams throughout the entire neighborhood. As a Muni streetcar driver yelled yesterday to a traffic control officer after taking 20 minutes to drive two blocks down Market Street, "You're making it worse!"

In the meantime, the San Francisco Fire Department might want to get off their well-paid behinds and mitigate some of the more dangerous offenders and situations.