When the pandemic broke out, crowds of people who settled inside rushed outside to have puppies.

It was then that Lynnet Spiegel knew she had to figure out how to get her pet store outside.

Fortunately, San Francisco officials created Shared Spaces, a program that allowed parking lots, sidewalks, and other public spaces to be used for commercial activities – commonly known as parklets.

Spiegel was thrilled. She hired a contractor and spent $ 20,000 on a parklet in front of Jeffrey’s Natural Pet Foods on Powell Street between Joe DiMaggio Park and Washington Square. There she hosted puppy socials, training courses, and other events for new dog owners in the neighborhood.

But it has become more difficult for the pet store.

Almost 18 months since she built her parklet, Spiegel recently received several quotes threatening fines if she doesn’t make structural changes, including lowering the side walls, moving plant pots off the sidewalk, and trimming the roof.

The parklet – and maybe their business – could be in jeopardy.

“I’m fighting Amazon and Chewy and I’m trying to keep a brick and mortar store open,” said Spiegel. “The only way for me to stay alive is to have other customer incentives than just buying groceries.”

Spiegel is not alone. As the Parklet program becomes a permanent fixture on the streets of San Francisco, tensions are simmering between city authorities, who are forced to impose a semblance of order on what is largely an ad hoc system, and traders, who are still emerging from the pandemic recover.

“As we are moving into a permanent program, the quickly built structures have to adapt to long-term use,” said Robin Abad, who heads the Parklet initiative. “We have turned a crisis response into a permanent opportunity to redesign the use of our roads for the benefit of the people who live, work and visit here.”

The Examiner spoke to business owners in North Beach and Chinatown, two neighborhoods where parklets were essential to the survival of commercial corridors, about the uncertain future of these outdoor spaces.

When parklets first hit the streets last summer, they were a boon to traders. Many said this was the only way to survive the lull in protection on the ground. According to the Shared Spaces website, at least 1,800 requests were approved, of which over 1,000 were for the parking lane.

It was also totally free-for-all.

Parklets ran all along the line in terms of design and durability. Random floors and ramshackle roofs were one end of the spectrum. On the other side were sprawling buildings adorned with lights, speakers, and decorations.

Initially there were bare guidelines, but enforcement was lackluster. Some community members have raised concerns about compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, traffic disruption, and first-aid access.

A law on the permanent use of sidewalks, parking lots and other parts of public space was introduced by Mayor London Breed in March and subsequently passed by the Board of Directors. Its aim is to enable companies to benefit from outdoor dining beyond the pandemic, and to codify stricter rules and regulations for parklets.

Abad said the passing of the law has given the city an opportunity to enforce compliance in some security-related areas now rather than waiting for the permanent version of the program to go fully into effect next year.

Notices of violations and fines are currently only issued to parklets in urgent need of repair to restore emergency access, particularly potential obstacles for fire departments to reach the building and comply with ADA rules, he said.

All other violations are expected to be lifted by July 2022.

When Chelsea Hung received an injury notice giving her 14 days to make structural changes to her parklet or risk fines of up to $ 500 a day, she was devastated believing she was meeting all fire safety and accessibility concerns .

Hung spent over $ 5,000 building the parklet in front of Washington Bakery and Restaurant, the business near Portsmouth Square that her family has owned and run for 25 years. She has modified the parklet several times since it was first built to accommodate changing city guidelines.

Given this recent injury – one Hung doesn’t quite understand because she says it’s written in a technocratic slang referring to city codes – she wonders if it would be easier to tear down the parklet instead.

Chelsa Hung, whose family has owned the Washington Bakery and Restaurant in Chinatown for decades, said she was surprised to receive an infringement notice from The City regarding the restaurant’s parklet. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

“We don’t know if the rules will keep changing,” she said. “We are faced with this dilemma of whether to continue investing in outdoor restaurants.”

Spiegel could face a similar dilemma. Her quotes require her to slightly reduce the size of her parklet, a move she says would force her to reduce the size of her puppy training classes.

“That wouldn’t be feasible,” she said. “It’s intolerable.”

Dealers agreed that fixing fire and accessibility issues is key to keeping the streets and residents of San Francisco safe, but they expressed dismay at how many of their violations fall into those buckets, especially after a year and a half with no problems.

“I think the confusion was that it was given piecemeal and it was given afterwards,” said Hanna Suleiman, who owns Caffe Greco on Columbus Avenue. “Nobody came to say, ‘You could do this and you couldn’t.’ They gave people the opportunity to do what they wanted and now they are coming back after over a year. “

Hanna Suleiman, owner of Caffe Greco, built the parklet in front of his North Beach restaurant before the pandemic broke out. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

Suleiman’s Parklet dates from before the pandemic. It was built in 2010 as one of the first publicly accessible parklets in the city, taking strict design and construction quality criteria into account. During the pandemic, he expanded it to include four motorcycle zone spaces and added a roof.

Now, he says, he is being asked to “follow guidelines that I was not aware of” within 10 days or face fines. He spent about $ 9,000 on the parklet during the COVID-19 crisis, and he believes he would have to spend up to an additional $ 5,000 to adapt it to the new code.

“I think there should be guidelines, no question about it, but there should be reasonable guidelines,” Suleiman said. “The idea was that this was built to help small businesses and now it is going to destroy small businesses.”

Several vendors told the Examiner that they could not decipher something as basic as the messages themselves and that they had received little help from the city. They said various quotes were from multiple agencies with no clear point of contact, and when they turned to numerous email addresses, they would hear nothing or waver between people for weeks.

Some of those who want to do this but need more time due to ongoing delivery bottlenecks, rising construction costs and staff shortages have not heard of possible extensions.

“It’s a total communications breakdown where businesses are being told contradicting things week after week and The City is failing to coordinate a unified, helpful approach to compliance,” said Aaron Peskin, supervisor of the North Beach and Chinatown borough belong.

Officials acknowledge the transition was confusing.

Abad told The Examiner that starting this month, departments will be issuing notifications to dealers in a single package with a cover sheet to help business owners “understand what they need to fix and create a plan for it.”

cgraf@sfexaminer.com

ChinatownnewsNorth BeachSmall Businesses

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SAN FRANCISCO – Vicha Ratanapakdee was tired of being locked up during the pandemic and was impatient for his regular morning walk. He washed his face, put on a baseball cap and face mask, and told his wife that when he got back he would drink the coffee she had made for him. Then, on a brisk and foggy winter morning in Northern California last month, he stepped outside.

About an hour later, Mr. Vicha, an 84-year-old retired accountant from Thailand, was forcibly thrown to the ground by a man who stormed him at full speed. It was the kind of violent body blow that would have knocked a young soccer player unconscious in full protective pads. The attack was fatal to Mr. Vicha, who was 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighed 113 pounds. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage two days later in a San Francisco hospital.

The video of the attack was recorded by a neighbor’s surveillance camera and watched with horror around the world. The killing of a defenseless elderly man has become a rallying cry among Asian Americans, many of whom endured racist taunts, swear words, and worse during the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the past year, researchers and activist groups have counted thousands of racist incidents against Americans of Asian descent, a surge in hatred they associate to former President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”. Mr Vicha’s family described his murder as racially motivated and resulted in a campaign to raise awareness among many prominent Asian Americans using the online hashtags #JusticeForVicha and #StopAsianHate.

“The Vicha assassination was as obvious as the day,” said Will Lex Ham, a New York-based actor who, after watching the video, flew from New York to San Francisco to attend protests and security patrols in Asian neighborhoods conduct. “There was no longer any way to ignore the violence that befell people who look like us.”

Antoine Watson, a 19-year-old resident of the neighboring town of Daly, was arrested two days after the attack and charged with the murder and ill-treatment of the elderly. He pleaded not guilty, but his attorney admits that his client had a “fit of anger”.

San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin says Mr. Vicha’s death was horrific. But he says there is no evidence that it was motivated by racial hatred.

Still, at a time when demands for racial justice have shaken a demographically developing nation, the assassination of Mr. Vicha was notable for the furious anger it aroused a diverse group of people from Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, South and Southeast Asia includes heritage. The assassination of a Thai man in America has given voice to a united community under the umbrella of an Asian-American identity.

In the weeks since his death, Mr. Vicha’s death has become a symbol of the vulnerability many in the Asian-American community feel at this moment.

Death is devastating to his family, both in California and abroad. In Thailand, the murder was front page and described as barbaric, a life shortened in a family where siblings usually live until their late 90s, relatives say.

Since retiring in 1996 from Kasikornbank, one of Thailand’s largest financial institutions, Mr. Vicha has traveled between San Francisco, where his oldest daughter lives, and Thailand, where his youngest daughter lives.

For months, Mr. Vicha had longed for Thailand, but couldn’t because of the pandemic. He didn’t like the cold and wet winter in San Francisco and missed his favorite southern Thai dishes as well as his extended family and friends.

His brother Surachai Ratanapakdee, 89, now the only surviving sibling of eight children, remembered Mr. Vicha as hardworking and curious about the world outside of the family farm’s rice fields, watermelon fields and orchards.

“Vicha was one of the few people in the village who spoke good English,” said Mr. Surachai.

Mr. Vicha then studied at Thammasat University in Bangkok, one of the most renowned institutions in the country.

His older daughter Monthanus described her father as a devoted Buddhist. She remains confused as to why he went without his Buddhist amulet on the morning of the attack, a protective talisman that he always wore around his neck.

Updated

July 24, 2021 at 11:34 a.m. ET

When Ms. Monthanus expressed her desire to attend graduate school two decades ago, Mr. Vicha supported her decision to enroll in the Business School at the University of California, Berkeley. When Ms. Monthanus married after graduation and decided to stay in San Francisco, Mr. Vicha and his wife came to raise their grandchildren.

At the time of the attack, Mr. Vicha was only months away from returning to Thailand. On January 15th, he received the first shot of the Moderna vaccine.

“We said: ‘Dad, we’ll be back soon!’” Recalls Ms. Monthanus.

Mr Vicha’s second shot was scheduled for February 12th, an appointment he would never see again.

His assassination came at a time when other disturbing images and reports were surfacing from across San Francisco Bay. Three days later, an attacker pushed a 91-year-old man to the ground in Oakland’s Chinatown, another video that exploded online.

This elderly victim has been mistakenly described as Asian in many news reports. Court documents give the victim’s name as Gilbert Diaz, and Carl Chan, a community leader and president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, said the victim was a Latino. But Mr Chan says he counted more than two dozen attacks on Asian-American victims in Chinatown, including two other people who were pushed by the assailant who knocked down Mr Diaz.

Crime data from prosecutors in San Francisco County and Alameda County, which includes Oakland, shows that people of Asian descent are less likely than other ethnic groups to be victims of crime over the past year. In San Francisco, where 36 percent of the population is Asian, 16 percent of known ethnicity crimes were Asian, a situation similar to Alameda County.

But leaders of the Asian Bay Area community say crime statistics are misleading because Asian American residents, especially immigrants, often fail to report assaults or robberies out of suspicion of the system or language barriers. Undeniable, say leaders of the Asian-American community across the country, is that the pandemic has created a climate of fear and a sense of insecurity from New York to California. Last week, California lawmakers approved $ 1.4 million in funds to prosecute and investigate racist incidents against Americans of Asian origin.

An increase in anti-Asian attacks

Last spring, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, a flurry of hatred and violence against people of Asian descent began in the United States.

• • Background: Community leaders say the bigotry was fueled by President Donald J. Trump, who often used racist terms such as “Chinese virus” to refer to the coronavirus.
  • Data: The New York Times used media reports from across the country to get a sense of the rising tide of anti-Asian bias, and found more than 110 episodes since March 2020 in which there was clear evidence of racial hatred.
  • Undervalued Hate crimes: The balance sheet may be a fraction of the violence and harassment given the general undercounting of hate crimes, but the broad survey captures episodes of violence across the country that have increased in number due to Mr Trump’s comments.
  • In New York: A wave of xenophobia and violence has been exacerbated by the economic fallout from the pandemic that dealt a severe blow to the Asian-American communities in New York. Many community leaders say racist abuse is overlooked by the authorities.
  • What happened in Atlanta: Eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed in gunfights at massage parlors in Atlanta on March 16. A Georgia prosecutor said the gunfights at the Atlanta area spa were hate crimes and that she will pursue the death penalty against the suspect. who is charged with murder.

“Our seniors are afraid to walk on their own streets,” said Chan.

Last year, Ms. Monthanus, Mr. Vicha’s daughter, was approached twice on the street by people who told her to leave the country because Asians caused the coronavirus, the attackers said.

Mr. Watson’s attorney Sliman Nawabi, a public defender, said his client was unable to identify Mr. Vicha’s ethnicity through his face mask, hat and winter clothing. Mr. Nawabi described Mr. Watson as someone who struggled with anger.

In the hours leading up to the attack, Mr Watson had a number of setbacks. He left home because of a family quarrel and was involved in a traffic accident at 2 a.m. in San Francisco. He was cited by the San Francisco Police Department for a stop sign and reckless driving and then slept in his car that night.

That morning, several surveillance cameras in the area caught Mr. Watson slapping his hand on a car, District Attorney Boudin said.

“It appears that the defendant was in some kind of tantrum,” said Boudin.

Then Mr. Vicha walked up Anzavista Avenue, a street overlooking the skyscrapers in the city’s financial district.

A witness told police officers that Mr. Watson said something like, “What are you looking at?” A surveillance camera in a neighbor’s home caught Mr. Watson charging across the sidewalk towards Mr. Vicha, who was about to hit the ground turned to his attacker.

Two days after the attack, Ms. Monthanus and her mother went to the place where Mr. Vicha was killed and saw that his blood was still staining the sidewalk. They scrubbed the sidewalk with brushes, wondering why no one had come out of town to do the same.

Mr. Vicha’s cremated remains were placed in two urns. Ms. Monthanus says she and her family will charter a boat under the Golden Gate Bridge and scatter some of it into the Pacific Ocean.

“I want him to be near me,” she said. “When we go to the beach, we can dream that he is with us.”

She wants to take the other urn back to her father’s hometown in southern Thailand, where the local Buddhist temple has a stupa where the family’s remains are kept. “His brothers and sisters are there,” said Ms. Monthanus. “You will all be together.”

The amulet, a valuable family heirloom, will be passed on to the next generation, said Ms. Monthanus.

“He always told me that if something happened to him, it had to be passed on to the grandchildren,” she said.

Poypiti Amatatham contributed the coverage from Bangkok.

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