A political rally of town hall on housing, transportation, and urban planning in San Francisco

Antonio Villaraigosa, Lateefah Simon, Jane Kim, and David Talbot at a forum at Mission High’s Auditorium discussed transportation, housing-related, and other issues. The event was like a political rally promoting Jane Kim’s candidacy for the District 11 San Francisco State Senate Seat and attendees were greeted with campaign posters and hand-outs.

David Talbot in an interview introduced Kim as “The first Korean-American elected to public office in San Francisco. We hope she will be representing the entire city in the state senate next year”.

And for former L.A Mayor Villaraigosa, the main topics of the conversation are housing and transportation issues. He said, “When I ran for mayor, I had the audacity to say we were going to make Los Angeles, the car capital of the U.S.–the gridlocked capital–a place where we re-imagined the town.”

And while Los Angeles is celebrating the construction of its subway spine, the Bay Area is trying to figure out how to make sure its aging transit system doesn’t fall apart. Simon said, “As long as BART is…underfunded, we have a real issue. We can not even talk about expansion until we fix our dilapidated and dangerous system”.

Simon, Kim, and Villaraigosa agreed that transit expansion is not an ends in itself it is about economic opportunities and solving inequities and the unaffordability of the Bay Area was a central focus of the talk. Kim said, “80 percent of housing and development is in my district”.

Talbot asked from the audience about the newer transportation such as Uber, Lyft and Google buses via twitter. Where Simon talked about the difficulty of the cabs at night and their cost. She told that the city is developing a two-class transportation system to overcome this problem.
Villaraigosa is agreed with the shared economy and commuter buses but he said that there should be some rules not only for the poor and middle class but also for the wealthy and powerful people.

Kim was also agreed with this but she said that there is no need of 200 stops because people can walk five or ten blocks. Simon and Kim said that for a real solution to cooperate transportation fees for using city bus stops should be raised and corporate buses should be available to all employees of the corporations.

2016 S-Class Mercedes: