A San Francisco business owner said he is fed up with graffiti all over the restaurant he’s trying to open. He’s taking to social media with his complaint because the city has served him with a notice to clean it up.
Viet Nguyen told NBC Bay Area Wednesday that he’s constantly painting over graffiti and the latest incident happened on the day after he put on a fresh coat.
“Next morning, come back and guess what? Same thing again, graffiti all over the place,” he said.
Nguyen owns Gao Viet Kitchen in San Mateo and he is opening another one in a few months in the Inner Sunset in San Francisco.
But this week, the San Francisco location was also hit with a violation notice from the city. It said the graffiti needs to be cleaned up in 30 days or he could face a $362 fine.
“They give you 30 days to clean it up, guess what you gotta do? but you clean it up and the next day it’s going to happen again. So what do I do? It’s really frustrating,” Nguyen said.
San Francisco Department of Public Works told NBC Bay Area Wednesday that after two years, they’ve started enforcing graffiti code violations again this week and someone filed a complaint to 311 about Nguyen's business. Officials said it’s up to property owners to paint over it.
“Properties that are hit time and time and time again can do something called applying for a hardship,” said Rachel Gordon, San Francisco Department of Public Works Spokesperson. "San Francisco Public Works will use our crews or contractor crews working for us to go and do courtesy abatement for six months."
But there might be help soon. There’s a proposal in the city budget to provide $4 million over two years, to clean up and paint over graffiti to help people like Nguyen, who are getting hit often.
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“It’s great news for the city as a whole because it means that the tags will be removed quickly, so, they don’t proliferate,” Gordon said.
“The worst part is when they do the graffiti, the glass, you can’t clean up, you can’t just paint over right?" Nguyen said.
Nguyen said he’s lost track of how much it’s cost him to cover the tagging. He hopes the city’s proposal is passed and that they focus on the vandals more than business owners.
“But I hope that would help with small businesses, because I could clean it up and do a lot of stuff. But there are some other small businesses, who’ve been struck by COVID and to clean up, to repaint it again and again, it’s not affordable," he said.
If that proposal is passed, the graffiti abatement program in the city could begin this Fall. Property owners would have to file a report to the city, when they’ve been hit.
