Notorious San Francisco eyesore may finally be demolished — despite years-long NIMBY revolt
A burned-out structure that has been an eyesore for San Francisco’s iconic North Beach neighborhood is set to be demolished — even after a tenant rights group blocked that effort at the last minute, trying to extend the years-long saga to fix the blighted property.
Still, the saga is not fully over yet, the building’s developer told The California Post. The Verdi Building at 659 Union Street has been sitting empty since two fires ravaged it in 2013 and 2018.
All that’s left of it now is a brick exterior and temporary shoring holding it up.
For more than 100 years, the Verdi building has stood on the corner of Columbus and Union in the North Beach area. KPIX
In 2023, real estate firm Red Bridge Partners filed to redevelop the building, but attempts have been met with fierce opposition from neighborhood groups such as the North Beach Tenants Committee.
Since then, the building has been a dead zone amid an otherwise active neighborhood. The city’s Department of Building Inspection called the structure dangerous, too, saying there’s an risk of collapse in a March report.
LA mayoral hopeful Nithya Raman ripped to shreds over fetid hellhole in her own backyard: ‘Failure to lead’
Nithya Raman is being blasted for failing to clear a dangerous LA River encampment after securing more than $4 million in state funding specifically to address it.
Nearly two years after a state grant, the money remains unspent while conditions along the river corridor continue to worsen.
e California Post first reported earlier this week that Raman secured a $4,011,357 grant to address a sprawling homeless encampment stretching across a 19-mile section of the Los Angeles River.
Roughly 90 people are living in tents, storm drains and makeshift shelters along in the area.
The grant was awarded after Raman submitted a proposal to the state promising intensive outreach, housing placements and pathways to permanent housing.
Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman is facing criticism over a $4 million state homelessness grant that remained unspent. Shutterstock / Matt Gush
Raman’s office blamed administrative and contracting delays.
“Councilmember Nithya Raman has consistently treated homelessness as the urgent crisis it is, which is why it is deeply frustrating when critical resources get caught in administrative and contracting processes,” a spokesperson told The Post.
The spokesperson added that the Encampment Resolution Fund “is intended to support rapid outreach and housing interventions, not sit idle while City departments work through bureaucracy” and said implementation is expected to begin later this month.
The Los Angeles River encampment has become a focal point in the mayor’s race. David Buchan for California Post
Monica Rodriguez says she’s not buying it and is using success in her own district as to why.
“There’s no bureaucracy,” Rodriguez told The Post. “It’s no different than any other contract that we engage in with a service provider. You issue the scope of work, you work with the provider, and you award the contract. That’s it.”
Rodriguez can use her own record as evidence of success.
Her office received funding through the same Encampment Resolution Fund program and, in roughly the same amount of time, housed 90 people and removed 40 RVs from city streets through her RV-to-Home initiative.
Monica Rodriguez points to her own record as evidence that the Encampment Resolution Fund works. Instagram/mrodcd7
Building on that initial success, Rodriguez said the broader program has now housed 387 people and removed 184 RVs citywide.
“When we got the $5 million from the state for the Encampment Resolution Fund, we had already been doing that work,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez also points to the LA River encampment as evidence that Raman’s campaign message of “urgency on homelessness” does not match their pace of progress.
“She chairs the homeless and housing committee and is now asking people to give her a promotion,” Rodriguez said.
Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez says her district used the same state Encampment Resolution Fund program to house 90 people and remove 40 RVs. Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The California Post has documented people living inside flood channels, beneath bridges and inside concrete culverts along the river.
Outreach workers and advocates have described rampant methamphetamine use, untreated mental illness, criminal activity and a revolving cycle of incarceration and homelessness.
Rodriguez said she cannot understand why other council districts have successfully moved Encampment Resolution Fund projects forward while Raman’s remains stalled.
“I don’t understand how everyone else is doing what Ms. Raman can’t,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez also points out that Raman is not an outsider looking in.
Rodriguez’s RV-to-Home program has housed hundreds of people and removed nearly 200 RVs, becoming a model now being expanded to other parts of Los Angeles. cd7.lacity.gov
As chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, Rodriguez says she already occupies one of the most powerful positions shaping homelessness policy in Los Angeles..
“Based on her failure to deliver in the role that she has now, I don’t understand how she’s claiming that she would work with any greater sense of urgency.”
“The numbers don’t lie,” she said. “The fact that it’s been a year and there’s been no commitment for the expenditure of those funds reflects a failure to lead.”
Rodriguez’s RV-to-Home program has since drawn attention beyond her district.
The initiative is now being used as a pilot program by Mayor Karen Bass’ administration and is expanding into other council districts as city leaders look for new ways to address the growing RV encampment crisis.
Opening and dumping garbage like raccoons, biting ICE agents like wild dogs. Are these people proud to call themselves human beings?
Are antifa members civilized human beings entitled to human rights and civil discourse, or are they gutterally growling wild animals?
Get a load of what they were caught doing in New Jersey:
That's what hogs or bears or raccoons do; they empty and dump garbage bags, wherever they find them, in their case, for practical reasons: to find the best pickins.' Then they crap all over the place, or make whoopee together inside the clanking cans, entirely fulfilling their animal nature, and leaving the rest of us a huge mess.
Antifa, on the other hand just dumps the trash for its own sake, supposedly because they don't like ICE or President Trump, though through the act of dumping, no itch is salved, they still hate ICE and President Trump after they get done making their messes to wallow in. Their act of dumping is just their collective personality in action.
But why stop at raccooning?
Some of them, like warthogs, actually bite:
Obviously, these are animal-identified people. They strew trash, they bite their betters.
And as such, they belong in cages, jail or zoo, makes no difference to any normal American. They can't be allowed out in rational company. The lunacy and disgustingness seen in Newark obviously calls for some kind of treatment. Wild animals belong in confinement and anyone coddling them has to be put to rights about where their rightful place is.Monica Showalter| May 30, 2026
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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