One Gig Politician

Tending to a stabbing victim after the sweep (Chron photo)

When an organization needs someone to shake things up, it often calls in an outsider (any allusion to national politics is imagined by you, dear reader). What can help the shaking is if the outsider has no interest in staying on, i.e., he or she wants to get in, accomplish concrete goals, then get out.

Interim SF Mayor Mark Farrell (whom I underestimated in January) is ridding the Mission District of homeless encampments . [bold added]

An army of cleaners, counselors and police descended upon the Mission District at dawn Wednesday — and by lunchtime, they had rendered the gentrifying district entirely free of homeless tent camps for the first time in recent memory.

And with that, San Francisco’s mayor had fired the first shot in what he said will be unending salvos of enforcement efforts in the coming weeks to try to rid city streets of tent encampments.

(According to the article, last summer the area had 287 tents.) I applaud Mark Farrell's determination. And he says he's not running for Mayor in 2018 or 2019.

“This is just the beginning,” Farrell said. “Tents should not be part of the permanent landscape in San Francisco. If, at the end of the day, a person resists everything we offer them in counseling, housing and other services, they shouldn’t be allowed to keep tents on the sidewalk.

“Maybe it takes a mayor not running for office to do it, but we need to clean up our streets throughout the city. We haven’t been pushing hard enough. We will now.”

Making this push, he said, is just part of what he characterized as a “sprint to the finish” of his short term as mayor, before someone wins June’s special election to fill out the late Mayor Ed Lee’s term. It is not, he insisted, part of positioning for a full-term run for mayor in 2019 — which he has repeatedly said he will not do.

Silicon Valley discovered that sometimes projects get done quicker and better in the gig economy. Maybe the same is true for gig politicians.