While the heavy equipment have long finished their work, and the foundations for two 4,000 square foot three-story single-family homes have been poured, as a tipster notes, spray cans have been hard at work at 1399 Clayton as well.
∙ Heavy Equipment Hard At Work At 1399 Clayton (We Do Believe) [SocketSite]
This is so lame – we need singapore style punishment for these taggers – caning!
Sniper team covering that site would have been socially productive.
what about all the spray paint i see all over the sidewalks and pavement by [PG&E] and the city? can we cane them too?
I say we cane the people who sell the spray paint. Also, we should cane left handed people. They really piss me off with their left handedness.
I have noticed a lot more graffiti in the city. Unfortunately some property owners are not good about removing it immediately. If you don’t it just leads to more…A Singapore style punishment would definitely be appropriate. And yes, PG&E have a lot to answer for too.
Banksy this is not. If you’re going to spray paint, at least put some zest and imagination into it. Lame.
The ladders make it look like an old Donkey Kong game. Taggers should be crushed under barrels.
99.9% of graffiti is just a lame stinking up the place with your name. You can however find inspired artistic stuff though that is almost always confined to out of the way places where people rarely go.
Hopefully no permanent harm is done here if the houses will be cover up those concrete retaining walls. But it is a big bummer if the developer intended to expose any of those concrete walls. If so then now they’ve got to be painted, an extra cost that precludes presenting a raw concrete texture.
4000 sqft and no parking…you know, i’ve noticed that many of the houses that show up on blogs are dogs in one way or another.
[Editor’s Note: We might be missing some sarcasm, but each house will have a two-car garage.]
They are tags…not graffiti. The police have caught taggers in the act in my SOMA neighborhood four different times. The DA choose to let them go even though neighbors would have testified …we saw them tagging! Anyone, things will not change as long as the Progressives who control the City consider tagging a quality of life issue.
The ladders make it look like an old Donkey Kong game. Taggers should be crushed under barrels.
Brilliant! well played, sir.
But it is a big bummer if the developer intended to expose any of those concrete walls. If so then now they’ve got to be painted, an extra cost that precludes presenting a raw concrete texture
better this happened now than after the buyer bought a unit. this way buyers know that exposed is a no-go.
clearly these units need to be covered in ivy or something.
interesting that the tagger couldn’t even put up different tags. same tag repeated 5 times? Yawn.
I’ve also found it very interesting that tagging letters look so feminine. These big balooney letters that look like they were inflated with Care Bears or something.
This site is prominent. That means the houses built here will have great views, but it also makes the site a big target during construction. Because the terrain is challenging here it is likely that the taggers live in close proximity to this site.
In San Francisco quality of life crimes rarely get successfully prosecuted for a number of reasons mostly having to do with how overloaded are the justice system and its jails. Seeing actions the government takes as opportunities to divide spoils between racial and cultural factions is a common problem in San Francisco, and can hardly be considered progressive.
San Mateo county just to the south has been dominated by political progressives for a couple of decades at least and has plenty of homeless and misguided youth and racial and cultural divisions, but the justice system there is managed differently with quality of life crimes being taken very seriously and always some space in the jails kept available for violators.
Cultural issues loom large here, but there are more dimensions to this than progressive or not. Anyone who thinks that politically the Bay Area does or should have much in common with Singapore should be caned.
The concrete work here doesn’t look as if it was intended to be exposed. The finish isn’t particularly high quality.
But if it was intended to be exposed it would kind of cool to let it get completely covered with tags and leave it that way – built in outsider art. I agree that it’s not Banksy. Not even close. But as a dense field of color and line it can be very effective. And appropriate for the kind of aesthetic that goes with exposed concrete walls.
I used to use a small moving company here in SF. It was basically two guys and a truck. The truck was white but not for long. Of course it got tagged. Repeatedly. So the owners decided to let it get completely covered with tags – I think they might have added a few of their own. It was gorgeous.
Yeah, I know, it would encourage bad behavior. Bad idea?
“But if it was intended to be exposed it would kind of cool to let it get completely covered with tags and leave it that way – built in outsider art…”
You can’t be serious. Most tagging/graffiti is ugly and just brings down the feel of neigborhoods. There are exceptions of course but the tagging in this case does not fit the bill. People who put down that amount of cash to buy a home aren’t going to be interested…
OK, so using Singapore style tactics may be overkill but seriously there should be serious consequences for defacing private or public property. There’s something about the concept of graffiti/tagging that really irks me…
I’ve read that the DA rarely pursues graffiti cases because it’s very difficult to empanel juries of SF residents who believe graffiti crimes are worth prosecuting. Sad commentary if you ask me…
Interesting in that my 14 yr old nephew visiting in June was sort of shocked at the amount of graffiti (esp.in the Lower Haight/Duboce Triangle). He didn’t think it was cool at all that trucks and buildings had graffiti, and asked why the police didn’t catch them. His disgust with tagged trucks and houses woke me up to how accepting most of us are of filth and police/DA inaction in our grimy city.
I find it doubtful the taggers live in the ‘hood. This construction site is at a bus stop for one of the busier cross-town bus routes, the 33-Stanyan.
I hate graffiti — even the “pretty” graffiti is just ugly vandalism to my eye. But SF does not really have a serious problem. Been to Rome lately? Just about every surface looks like these walls (yet the city is still beautiful). I agree the vandals should be prosecuted, and any graffiti is too much, but let’s not blow this out of proportion. SF also has very good grassroots programs for eradicating graffiti. As far as quality of life issues go, the homeless problem is a much bigger drag than any graffiti problem.
I don’t know whether I am serious or not. It’s just an idea that intrigues me. You certainly couldn’t leave the walls as they are and sometimes you can make something better by deliberately exaggerating it. One of the hallmarks of good design is turning a flaw into a feature.
I totally agree that graffiti is pure blight with no redeeming characteristics. It disturbs me to see buildings and vehicles defaced. It’s ugly and it suggests a world out of control. On the other hand I must confess that I sometimes (guiltily) admire and appreciate it. The website Graffiti Archaeology has some interesting examples.
http://www.otherthings.com/grafarc/index.html
“His disgust with tagged trucks and houses woke me up to how accepting most of us are of filth and police/DA inaction in our grimy city.”
This is sort of where the stereotypical smugness comes in. If you complain about these sorts of things (or any of SF’s other problems, like homeless people), you are clearly not enlightened enough and are told “it’s a city. You should go live in Walnut Creek to avoid it.” These sorts of things are thought of as a mark of the city’s artsiness or some such nonsense.
I’ve mentioned this before, but a stereotypical hipster response to random violent street crime appears to be “lol mission still got it”:
http://missionmission.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/beatdown-and-mugging-on-capp-and-24th/
We have truly fallen in our civic standards and we should all strive to make our city better, rather than to accept these things.
“Been to Rome lately? Just about every surface looks like these walls (yet the city is still beautiful)”
Bingo. Tagging is a blight but beautiful architecture can transcend it. I find ugly architecture a worse, more permanent, larger form of tagging in terms of bringing down a neighborhood. Architects are driven by a desire to leave their mark, too.
(N.B. beautiful architecture need not be Roman style.)
Crowded jails is no reason not to prosecute vandals. They could be sentenced to, oh, I don’t know, maybe 100 hours of cleaning muni busses? Along with some steep fines.
In any event, SF’s jails have not been crowded lately due to the hundreds of narcotics cases that were dismissed after the crime lab scandal.
If anyone would care to look, tagging cases are prosecuted by the D.A. in the relatively rare instance of someone getting arrested for it. And yes, some of these cases have been taken to trial.
“They could be sentenced to, oh, I don’t know, maybe 100 hours of cleaning muni busses?”
In fact, plenty of people convicted of low-level criminal charges are already sentenced to work-release programs. A good example is people with DUIs. Cleaning Muni buses would be a great work-release for taggers.