Invasion of the neighborhood-killing helicopters

It’s hard­ly news that UCSF wants to build a heli­pad adjoin­ing the new Mis­sion Bay cam­pus. As should be expect­ed, com­mu­ni­ty activists are pound­ing the pave­ment try­ing to drum up resis­tance. The fly­er left on my front porch this morn­ing reads

IMAGINE HELICOPTERS FLYING RIGHT ABOVE YOUR HEAD DAY & NIGHT
UCSF plans to build a heli­pad at Third/Mariposa!
Join us to tell them NO! 

There will be some sort of event at Genen­tech Hall on June 18^th, from 7pm til 9pm at which we’re sup­posed to get out and protest or some­thing like that. It’s a great idea to get peo­ple from the com­mu­ni­ty out to voice opin­ions, but I real­ly resent being told what to think. What if I want to join to tell them, «hey, a heli­pad! That’s cool!»? Obvi­ous­ly I’m free to, regard­less of the lan­guage on the fly­er, but it still makes me doubt the integri­ty of the com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ers who lit­tered the neigh­bor­hood with let­ter-sized sheets. If you care about democ­ra­cy and the right of the com­mu­ni­ty to deter­mine its des­tiny, why not encour­age every­one in the neigh­bor­hood to come and voice their opin­ion whether they agree or not?

This issue smacks of NIM­BY­ism com­bined with a bizarre brand of resis­tance to change. I can see why peo­ple would­n’t want a land­fill or a pow­er plant in their neigh­bor­hood, but being opposed to a hos­pi­tal just seems mean-spir­it­ed. Sure, the protest is only against the heli­pad to be built at the hos­pi­tal, but still: we’re talk­ing about the sort of facil­i­ty that most neigh­bor­hoods only wish they could get their hands on.

Last year a pro-heli­pad fly­er was spot­ted by the good folks at potrerohillsf.com read­ing «when your BMW hits me, I want a heli­copter ride.» It’s a tad disin­gen­u­ous, as the heli­pads will be bring­ing peo­ple in from oth­er hos­pi­tals around the Bay Area. The plans for the new UCSF hos­pi­tal don’t appear to have any emer­gency ser­vices facil­i­ties, so the odds that some­one hit by a car would be evac­u­at­ed by heli­copter are astro­nom­i­cal­ly slim. Nev­er­the­less, that fly­er point­ed­ly con­tains an impor­tant implic­it ques­tion: what’s more impor­tant, the prop­er­ty val­ues of the clos­est neigh­bors to a heli­pad, or the lives saved by these facilities?

Besides, the pres­ence of hos­pi­tals in NOPA, Pacif­ic Heights, the Cas­tro or the Rich­mond don’t seem to have killed the prop­er­ty val­ues. I have to won­der whether it has increased rather than decreased the prices of homes in the neighborhoods.

Final­ly, the sen­sa­tion­al tone of today’s fly­er’s head­line sug­gests its author does­n’t live here. We have heli­copters over­head all the time. Police heli­copters fre­quent­ly buzz around here, and those things can be darn loud when they fly low enough. Per­haps a heli­pad would mean more of this sort of thing, although I sus­pect that police try­ing to spot a sus­pect from the air are going to be clos­er to the ground than a heli­copter trans­port­ing a patient from one facil­i­ty to anoth­er. Still, why any­one liv­ing in Potrero or Dog­patch would have to «imag­ine» heli­copters fly­ing over our heads escapes me.

The fly­er dis­trib­uted this morn­ing includ­ed both of these links:

http://www.stophelipad.com/ (seems to be all about the heli­pad planned for SF General)
http://community.ucsf.edu/

I sug­gest that any­one in the ‘hood should stop in on Mon­day to let them know what you think, yea or nay.