Feb 12
No More Hipster Scum?
I know I’m late to the game on this, but recently Mission District residents (mainly Valencia Street) lobbied the SF Planning Commission and by a unanimous vote of 7-0, voted to deny American Apparel a permit to open a store on Valencia Street.
As much as I hate the hipsters that have taken over my neighborhood (and, like a virus, the surrounding neighborhoods), I don’t get this move. American Apparel, despite having one of the perviest CEOs in history, is a socially aware American (not to mention Californian) company that pays its workers a decent wage, gives health care to workers, and supports noble causes such as No on Prop. 8. Yet, because they are a chain, they are automatically equal to the Gap, Home Depot, and Walmart (all companies that have been turned down for building permits by the SF Planning Commission).
So in the worst economic recession the United States has seen since the 1930s, we are preventing a good and popular American company from producing jobs in our city and in our neighborhood when we’re expected to lose 2 million jobs in 2009. Nevermind that San Francisco is estimated to have a budget deficit of $575.6 million.
For the sake of disclosure, I get all my American Apparel merchandise for free, so I could care less where American Apparel sets up shop. But I don’t understand the downside of an American Apparel in the Mission. Fight McDonald’s on 24th and Mission. Hell, fight the drug dealers and prostitutes south of 16th Street. Why fight a company that does right by its workers?
It’s reasons like these that I hate my own city sometimes.
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