SF Mayor Newsom asks: What do you need? | San Francisco Chronicle

Newsom asks: What do you need?
In door-to-door visits, S.F. workers extend helping hand to crime-weary residents

Rachel Gordon, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 11, 2004



San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom knocked on a door at the Sunnydale public housing project Thursday morning and found a surprised Osvel Bethea, a 16-year-old who lives there with his sister.

Newsom asked him what he plans to do this summer, and was met with little more than a shrug and a brief comment about wanting to work. The mayor handed Bethea a flyer with information about summer jobs for youth and implored the teenager to follow up.

"You're in trouble if you don't. I know where you live,'' Newsom joked.

The mayor's unsolicited visit was just one of thousands that a cadre of city workers and volunteers plan to make this summer as part of a new door-to- door campaign devised by Newsom's staff to confront the entrenched despondency in San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods hit hardest by a rising tide of violence.

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I can't remember this approach being used to survey the real needs of residents in any large city before. Of course, just because I haven't heard of it doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

What a powerful way to increase a sense of enfranchisement - if data from needs are released to the public along with city plans for efforts to deal with those needs. That is - if this project has real follow through - this is a huge.

Even though some here can't stand him.

DTH

could have something to do with that.

I assume you know the old saying. No apologies for the ugly campaign--I'm damn glad this guy is our mayor.

quite a program.