SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin has been recalled, the Associated Press is projecting.

59.9% of San Francisco voters opted to oust the district attorney by voting Yes on Proposition H, compared to 40.0% who voted to keep him in office, according to the last preliminary election returns Tuesday at 10:40 pm

Boudin’s recall has national implications, a sign that voters are increasingly concerned about public safety, and illustrating a cleavage in priorities between progressive activists and rank-and-file Democratic voters even in deep-blue San Francisco.

Mary Jung, the former chair of the city’s Democratic Party who became chair of the recall campaign, stated that “San Francisco voters sent a clear message that they want a District Attorney who prioritizes public safety for every community. San Francisco voters are engaged and well-informed. They know that we can have important criminal justice reforms and public safety for all, but that neither was being achieved with Chesa in office.”

Jung stated that “San Franciscans want leadership that holds serious, violent, and repeat offenders accountable while never forgetting the rights of victims and their families.”

“This election does not mean that San Francisco has drifted to the far right on our approach to criminal justice,” Jung continued. “In fact, San Francisco has been a national beacon for progressive criminal justice reform for decades and will continue to do so with new leadership. By recalling Boudin from office, San Francisco can now move forward in charting a better and safer path for our city.”

California primary election 2022 results

In a speech at The Ramp on the waterfront, Boudin interpreted the results as the result of frustration with the city’s intractable problems, such as City Hall corruption, and societal changes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

“People are right to be frustrated. There’s so much room for improvement. People should hold all of us to a higher standard,” Boudin said.

Nonetheless, Boudin continued to blame the recall on the right-wing.

“Let me make it very clear about what happened tonight,” Boudin said. “The right-wing billionaires outspent us three-to-one and exploited an environment in which people are appropriately upset.”

Boudin was first elected as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2019, before many of the tumultuous events that have rocked American society in recent years — the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, the nationwide increase in violence, the 2020 election and both impeachments of former President Donald Trump, and the mass protests after the police killing of George Floyd.

Boudin had been a deputy public defender and promised one of the most far-reaching experiments in criminal justice reform that a major American city had seen. He promised to go after rogue police and large corporations and reduce mass incarceration and racial disparities within the system.

For Boudin, the fight was personal ⁠—his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, spent much of Chesa Boudin’s life in prison due to their role in a 1981 robbery while they were part of the violent leftist group the Weather Underground.

Boudin was also a leading face in a national movement of progressive prosecutors, a movement that included his predecessor as San Francisco’s top prosecutor, George Gascon.

Boudin’s 2019 run had been the first open race for district attorney in about a century, until Gascon abruptly resigned prior to his run for Los Angeles District Attorney, leading Mayor London Breed to appoint her favored candidate, Democratic regular Suzy Loftus, as the interim district attorney.

Loftus lost the position in the final round of ranked choice voting by a margin of 1.6%, and just months after Boudin took the reins of the office it seemed like the winds were in his favor as tens of millions of Americans expressed outrage over the very injustices Boudin promised to fight.

SF DA Chesa Boudin addresses recall, crime live in primetime on KRON4

But the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown brought with it a nationwide increase in homicides and violent crime. While San Francisco’s homicide rate has been about the same for most of the last decade, burglaries have risen 45% since 2019, and in 2021 alone the city saw a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders of 567%.

The alleged December 31, 2020 killing of two women in a south of Market intersection by Troy McAlister was a crucial turning point. McAlister had trouble with the law for most of his adult life, and between June and December 2020 was arrested by the San Francisco Police Department five times. In each of the cases, however, the DA’s office declined to file charges.

A petition asking Boudin to resign garnered almost 15,000 signatures and its author, former Republican mayoral candidate Richie Greenberg, spearheaded the first recall petition, which came up short.

In a statement to KRON4 on Tuesday, Greenberg stated that the recall was “a bittersweet effort.”

“We shouldn’t be popping champagne bottles,” he stated. “People have died under Chesa Boudin’s watch. Lives have been ruined, families broken, businesses shuttered.

“Let this recall send a clear message to the rest of City Hall officials that we are unhappy with their governance,” he continued. “Polls recently show dismally low approval ratings for the Board of Supervisors, who need to take a hard look in the mirror and consider actual changes they each need to make in addressing our city’s myriad issues.”

And, however, an effort spearheaded by former San Francisco Democratic Party chair Mary Jung and bolstered by the support of former Assistant District Attorney Brooke Jenkins gained more and more momentum through 2021, qualifying for the ballot.

The signs were coming, though: Boudin’s chief of staff David Campos lost an assembly bid in April in a nearly 2-1 loss.

The recall succeeded despite only two supervisors endorsing it, and with the opposition of a majority of the city’s supervisors, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Democratic Party, though Breed’s silence was conspicuous.

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Breed, whose crackdown on poor street conditions in the Tenderloin neighborhood was questioned by Boudin, will now get to choose his successor.

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The post San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin recalled, projections point out appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

If you want a handy guide to the small-scale interventions that are in vogue these days for urban America — from parklets to pop-ups to cultural programming — a newly released “action plan” for downtown San Francisco is a valuable place to start.

If you also want a document that offers a realistic blueprint for bringing the city’s Financial District back to life, keep looking.

That’s the challenge in trying to gauge the merits of the often-inventive Public Realm Action Plan released this week by Downtown SF, a business nonprofit that provides services to 43 blocks stretching from Jackson Square south past Market Street almost to the Embarcadero.

It’s a smart assessment of how streets and outdoor spaces in the tower-studded terrain could evolve in coming years. It also concedes that, 28 months after we were all told to go home and shelter in place to ward off the coronavirus, barely half of the district’s workforce has returned to their offices.

A pedestrian walks past a building for lease inside a sunken public plaza surrounding One Bush Street at the corner of Market and Sutter streets in San Francisco.

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

And that’s the problem: what frames negative perceptions of the Financial District right now is empty storefronts and mostly vacant high-rises, not the lack of shady trees or lunchtime concerts.

To their credit, the people behind the plan acknowledge that their vision to activate dormant sidewalks is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.

“This is not going to solve all the issues downtown; we know that,” said Claude Imbault, deputy director of the nonprofit. “This is a tool to start the conversation.”

The plan draws heavily on what’s known in planning circles as tactical urbanism, where the aim is to jump-start an area’s potential with small enticements rather than wait for large-scale investments. The idea is that plenty of people working and living nearby are eager to explore the civic landscape, if they have a reason to do so.

A pedestrian walks past a staircase leading to a sunken public plaza surrounding One Bush Street at the corner of Market and Sutter streets in San Francisco.

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

Of the six areas targeted by Downtown SF as potential spots to focus on short-term, the so-called Market Oasis gives a taste of what upgrades are envisioned — and the challenge of pulling some of them off.

The oasis would transform the north side of Market between Sansome and Front streets, a concentrated dose of what sets the Financial District apart from other neighborhoods. Ignore the vacant storefronts, look up instead, and the 29-story Shell Building thrusts skyward with 1920s aplomb directly across from One Bush St., 20 stories of bespoke midcentury modern.

For history buffs there’s the Mechanics Monument, a muscle-bound iron celebration of labor by sculptor Douglas Tilden from 1901. The shell of a 1910 banking temple holds one of the district’s most prominent privately owned public spaces, which are required by the city in new commercial development projects.

The action plan would enliven the scene via “an improved experience of significant public spaces” — one that would include colorful tables and chairs, planters filled with flowers and trees, light projections at night and lunchtime concerts or other events throughout the week.

As for the zone’s prominent but empty retail spaces, including a circular pavilion rising from the sunken plaza at One Bush, it’s suggested that a “buzzy lunch spot” could go into one, while “a collection of short-term pop-ups” could fill another. The pavilion is envisioned as holding “a highly visible downtown destination.”

An empty walkway leads through a sunken public plaza surrounding One Bush Street at the corner of Market and Sutter streets in San Francisco.

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

But the plan is vague on how this happens, much less spell out where the money might come from to jazz things up. The goal instead is to take the plan and its pilot projects — starting with Leidesdorff Street, a short alley that ends at the Transamerica Pyramid — to gauge what interest there might be from building owners and public agencies.

Even if workers were clocking in upstairs at pre-pandemic numbers, there’s no guarantee that “Market Oasis” would magically blossom. The plan envisions a string of buoyant spaces within two short blocks, including the sunken moat-like plaza and the city-owned Mechanics Plaza on the east side of Battery Street, where Tilden’s sculpture resides. There are only so many workers to go around — you can imagine one or two spaces coming alive, but not all of them at once, on an ongoing basis.

So, what happens when the novelty fades? The city’s Public Works department freshened up Mechanics Plaza back in 2014, replacing tattered wooden benches with bright metal street furniture while adding stands for people to recharge cell phones or fill their water bottles. The vitality ebbed within a few years. When I stopped by Monday, a grand total of one person was eating lunch on a granite block next to an empty planter.

The plan’s creators acknowledge that while snappy designs and short-term pop-ups can generate buzz, they aren’t enough.

People eat lunch at the foot of a statue inside Mechanics Plaza along Market Street in San Francisco.

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

“Whatever we do has to be a campaign,” said Laura Crescimano, whose Sitelab Urban Studio crafted the plan for Downtown SF with John Bela and Fehr & Peers. “These things happen in layers. People want to go to ‘a thing’ that’s a series of things.”

Ultimately, the value of the “action plan” might be as a tool kit to draw on, whether in the Financial District or other commercial districts.

“I appreciate the thoughtful approach they’ve taken … it’s a wonderful resource,” said Kate Sofis, director of the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Her office has the task at City Hall of finding ways to revive the larger downtown scene. “Some of the things they want to do are exactly the things we want to do.”

San Francisco’s Financial District won’t be returned to its bustling heyday by a more humane concept of public space. But small moves can add up — and with luck, some of the ideas offered by Downtown SF will help to move things along.

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron

The post Downtown San Francisco’s revival plan wants greater than dwell music and lightweight projections appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.