A total of 733 illegal billboards have been removed from buildings in San Francisco since 2007. Of the 969 billboards that remain, 860 are legal with 109 left to be removed.
Over the same period of time, São Paulo has not only removed over 8,000 billboards from its city’s streets, but all, and they mean all, outdoor advertising as well.
Border, the Brazilian Association of Advertisers, was up in arms over the move. In a statement released on [October 2, 2006], the date on which law PL 379/06 was formally approved by the city council, Border called the new laws “unreal, ineffective and fascist”. It pointed to the tens of thousands of small businesses that would have to bear the burden of altering their shopfronts under regulations “unknown in their virulence in any other city in the world”. A prediction of US$133 million in lost advertising revenue for the city surfaced in the press, while the São Paulo outdoor media owners’ association, Sepex, warned that 20,000 people would lose their jobs.
Others predicted that the city would look even worse with the ads removed, a bland concrete jungle replacing the chaos of the present. North Korea and communist Eastern Europe were cited as indicative of what was to come. “I think this city will become a sadder, duller place,” Dalton Silvano, the only city councillor to vote against the laws and (not entirely coincidentally) an ad executive, was quoted as saying in the International Herald Tribune. “Advertising is both an art form and, when you’re in your car, or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom,” he claimed.
According to a survey of city residents last year, 70 percent have found the ban to beneficial; the advertising industry in Sao Paulo has been thriving as it’s been forced to turn to more effective media; and the city, the 9th richest city in the world, appears to have become even more vibrant and prosperous over the past six years.
∙ General Advertising Sign Program: Fifth Annual Report [sf-planning.org]
∙ São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising [businessweek.com]
∙ São Paulo advertising goes underground [ft.com]
I wish we’d remove [the homeless] instead.
I mainly would ban billboards on all roofs of buildings which wreck views (think how Paris would be trashed in a sec with on-roof messaging).
Illuminated billboards on streets within close proximity to residences are also an issue. The Sunset and Richmond have many — with large fluorescent signs a door down, or across the street from quiet homes.
Less is more.
Well if you tear down the billboards then we can repurpose the [homeless] as billboards, perhaps they will bother you less if they are all covered in ads.
@ invested, so true, but I assume you do not meanit when it comes to SF density.
My point was the I find it ironic and trivial that SF citizens complain about billboards up high are destroying their quality of life while the street level is filled with drug addicts, urine stained concrete, shopping carts, people living in doorways, and aggressive panhandlers, yet nobody seems to be complaining about that.
No billboards in Vancouver either (except on First Nation land). And only one tiny section of freeway on the edge of town too.
I was driving back home on 80 last night and thought about the distraction these billboards might create for some drivers.
We are continually inundated with advertising wherever we go. The billboards of all dimensions in and around San Francisco are from bothersome to egregious in their makeup. It will be a visually brighter and better day when they are all pulled down, never to be seen again. The doom and gloom of Sao Paulo did not come to pass sans billboards. San Francisco should expect the same.
“Well if you tear down the billboards then we can repurpose the [homeless] as billboards…”
Or flip it around and house the homeless within billboards/
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As for driver distractions there was an electronic billboard company that advertised their billboards were “impossible to ignore”. Expect a motorist to defend their negligence in causing a collision sometime soon because their attention was grabbed by one such billboard.
The billboards at the northeast corner of Union Square are illegal? Unbelievable. You’d think those would be the first to be removed.
But billboards are the primary way that people learn that it’s not ok to shake a baby. Won’t someone think of the children?
So this means that the big ass billboard on Valencia south of McCoppin along the freeway that the Bay Guardian rents for every election won’t have the big ass pictures of progressives any more?
Would be nice to have a link to the interactive map shown – I searched Google Maps to no avail. Editor??
[Editor’s Note: No need to be let down by Google, try following our first link (which would eventually lead you here: General Advertising Sign Map).]
@ invested, so true, but I assume you do not meanit when it comes to SF density.
I meant ban all on-roof billboards. Rooftop billboards ruin views, ruin streetscapes, vistas.
Related –coming into SF via Oakland side of the Bay Bridge, and what was once an exciting view of SF’s undulating hills and glimpses of water is now massive electronic billboards.
Screens everywhere — we cannot be without our screens.
Ack…nevermind, found it in the document.
Would love for a billboard ban. Every time Im headed on or off the Bay Bridge I wish for that.
SF is removing illegal billboards –
no sanctuary for you billboards
If we could trade the billboards for just one area of Times Square level neon, I’d be for it. There’s something to the phrase “bright lights, big city”. We keep thinking like that “little Mediterranean village”.
I thought the proposal to allow the neon on Market St. was a good idea. Another possibility is 4th & Mission (Metreon corner) or Broadway & Columbus. Just lets have somewhere that’s alive 24/7 and lights are bright.
there already is neon – corner of Columbus & Broadway – it feels a bit like Times Square (pre-Giuliani)
It is interesting how many posters here find billboards comparable to human beings.
If a no ads in public space rule might be considered, then maybe something similar could be done for radio and television since the spectrum is a kind of public space? Just a radical thought.
Paris has huge corporate logos on scores of buildings around the Boulevard Périphérique. New York has billboards in every borough. But “we the people” of San Francisco consider it blight to be “assaulted” by billboards. Billboards don’t ruin views or damage streetscapes, they are part of well textured urban views, part of our communication and revenue systems, and sometimes they can even be fun.
Trees block views, buildings block views, the very hills our city is built on block views––are the anti-billboard fascists going after those next? Why people in this town feel compelled to object to something that has a perfectly legitimate place in a dense urban landscape speaks to the terrible downside of the vocal minority driven community decision making process that has evolved here.
This is a great world-city, not an array of pastoral backwater hillocks with butterflies and soft mossy carpets everywhere. Complain to your representatives about something that is actually a visual and cultural tragedy–like homelessness, or 25% of all car accidents being caused by people texting or phoning. Billboards don’t cause either of those.
“Advertising is both an art form and, when you’re in your car, or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom,”
LOL!
How about something that prys on human weaknesses to make us feel bad about ourselves, and think we need to spend our money on som product to b worthy, successful, attractive to the opposite sex etc.
Hard to escape advertising now, even in back of cabs etc..
Street art > Advertising.
“Trees block views, buildings block views, the very hills our city is built on block views…”
Trees and buildings provide a significant direct benefit that balances their adverse affects on views. Billboards do not. They just add visual clutter and degrade the landscape.
And hills? You must be kidding to compare a human constructions like billboards to geologic features that have been here since time immemorial.
There’s big money in outdoor advertising and obviously those who benefit from those vertical “properties” are going to defend them with all they have. But the value of an advertising property is proportional to their market share of eyeballs that they attract. Electronic media like TV and the internet have been claiming more market share and eroding the value of outdoor advertising for quite a while.
Sorry for the mixed metaphor, the writing is on the wall: billboards are going extinct.
@Mole: “If a no ads in public space rule might be considered, then maybe something similar could be done for radio and television since the spectrum is a kind of public space? Just a radical thought”
I am sorry you are having to deal with all those commercial interruptions when watching “How I met your mother”
Billboards are not illegal!
“Billboards are not illegal!” — some billboards are, if they’re put up without a permit. Just like driving isn’t illegal, unless you do it without a license. This isn’t about banning billboards, it’s just removing the ones that aren’t permitted. There will still be 860 perfectly legal billboards in the city. The comparison to Sao Paolo is unfounded.
“This is a great world-city, not an array of pastoral backwater hillocks with butterflies and soft mossy carpets everywhere.”
If you think SF is a great “world city” you haven’t travelled enough. It definitely punches above its weight but it’s a stellar provincial capital at best. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I think billboards are fine in the city, but I don’t care for them out in the country.
Hawaii totally bans billboards, just like Sao Paulo.
really? what about the “Pelosi is killing California agriculture” on I-5?
free speech exception?
Great to see our hard-working and underpaid city officials dedicating time and energy to crucial issues such as this. Well…this plus determining where you can and can’t open a Chipotle.
of course, if you think that city officials are lazy and overpaid, dedicating precious time and energy to a trivial issue, you can always get behind a candidate in the next election that promises to avoid working on such issues, or better yet, run yourself.
There are some things you can do something about, such as illegal billboards, and other things that are either a whole lot less tractable or almost completely out of your hands, such as “street[s] filled with drug addicts, urine stained concrete…people living in doorways, and aggressive panhandlers” due to the effects of the infamous Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (which would require a repeal at the state level).
Most times, it’s best that you work on the things that are in your power to change.
correcto but that act only goes to hospital care;
criminalizing loitering, pnahandling, urinating, could result in a prison sentence then no issue;
^^^ Because our prisons have plenty of capacity for such minor quality of life offenders ?
Man if they started putting everyone that urinated in public in prison then very few guys would actually be able to graduate from college without a criminal record. But I guess if we just enforced certain laws against the undesirable people it would be okay.
solution: build more prisons;
alternatively, converting remote “prison” islands to prisons serves same purpose – perhaps the Farallons;
Most of the college-age guys that get cited for urinating in public will pay the fine, or at worst serve out their community service sentence, and that’ll be the worst encounter with law enforcement they’ll ever have. They’ll go on to live productive lives, paying taxes and contributing to society.
The way it would work against chronic homeless inebriates in practice would be to have the penalties escalate: first offense would be a regular fine, second offense would be a bigger fine, third offense even larger fine or short-term jail time, fourth offense mandatory short-term jail time and so on.
Since homeless chronic inebriates don’t have anything to lose, and don’t have money that they want to spend paying fines, they often don’t show up for court dates, and hence would get a bench warrant at offense three (or earlier) and get the jail time earlier than Joe, the backslapping college frat boy. Sometimes jail is the first opportunity that people like this have to get and stay sober.
No selective enforcement targeting “the undesirable people” necessary.
I’m all for building more prisons, the problem is that they’re expensive to operate over the long term, and California voters don’t want to pay taxes to support/maintain them.
Brahma, yeah right no selective enforcement just people with money get to pay a fine, people without money go to prison.
But besides the issue of your skewed version of fairness, I was responding directly to the comment that was directly advocating prison for ‘quality of life’ crimes (“criminalizing loitering, pnahandling, urinating, could result in a prison sentence then no issue.”)
Rillion, ‘quality of life’ crimes are just that: crimes, even if they are handled as infractions.
The point I was trying to make, and this was also in direct response to ‘wrath’, is that the usual, fine-based penalties for ‘quality of life’ crimes doesn’t deter chronic homeless people from committing those crimes because they don’t have the money to pay fines, and so they ignore the penalties associated with committing those crimes, which in turn eliminates the deterrent effect of the laws against those behaviors.
What ‘wrath’ proposed was to restore the deterrent effect by imposing jail time on those who can ignore fine-based penalties and thus commit quality of life crimes with impunity. My contribution was just to note that you could avoid imposing jail time on everybody, and thus avoid a lot of unnecessary costs, by making sentences ‘scale up’ based on number of previous offenses so as to not encourage or require selective enforcement. If people of any socioeconomic class were multiple offenders, they’d still face the same increase in penalties, but in the usual case where chronic homeless people commit multiple offenses, they’d just reach jail faster.
As far as “fairness”, well:
Anyway, isn’t this all moot? I seem to recall that during the Newsom administration, an alternative was put in place. Here’s the Chronicle in 2007, S.F. Plan To Tackle Nuisance Crimes:
I haven’t read anything about this recently, so I don’t know if it actually got implemented, but it seems like a better idea than what I (and ‘wrath’) threw out there. I don’t spend enough time in The ‘loin to have a feel for whether or not it’s made an appreciable difference.
Brahma, myy mocking response was a way to express my disagreement with using penalties on quality of life crimes as a defacto way of indefinately incarcerating the mentaly ill. Are you disputing that point or are you just quibbling over my example?
Wrath’s comment appeared to be advocating using prison time for those crimes as a way to get a round the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act. To me calling for the indefinate imprisonment of people for urinating in public as a way to indefinately detain them is a bad idea. And if you are going to have laws on the books that allow for extremely long prison terms for urinating in public then you are going to have to enforce them fairly, which means eventually some people that were not originally the intended targets of the legislation will likely run afoul of it.
Rillion, fair enough. I guess I don’t dispute your point re: using penalties on quality of life crimes as a de facto way of indefinitely incarcerating the mentally ill. It may be that eventually some people who were not the intended target of the legislation will end up being penalized unjustly because of it and that would demonstrate poor policy design. I concede that.
However, going back to the larger picture, I do think having large numbers of demonstrably crazy people living on the streets, urinating and defecating in public, aggressively panhandling or stealing in order to finance their addictions and so on, negatively impacts the quality of life for residents and tourists alike. For this reason, I personally believe that the state has a rational basis to detain people that can’t stop behaving this way indefinitely.
My understanding is that before Lanterman-Petris-Short was enacted, such people were committed to state mental hospitals, and then Ronald Reagan and the state legislature decided to shift that responsibility to other agencies, but the money to take over that responsibility never materialized.
As Milkshake mentions above, an analogous dynamic is playing out now with Gov. Brown shifting nonviolent criminals and parolees to counties, so trying to have such people detained in prisons isn’t going to work in the current fiscal milieu.
So it’s not that indefinite detention of the homeless mentally ill is a bad idea, it’s because Californians don’t want to pay for it. If Vicki Hennessy had a proposal to enable her to address this at the county level, I’d be all for it.