In the 1970s and ‘80s, political posters filled the Mission District’s urban landscape. Juan Fuentes started making posters because he said it democratized art. “The power of art is its ability to distribute information. Poster making is more immediate than oil painting, which could take months to finish. So the message could reach more people, faster, with posters.”

In a San Francisco State print shop acrid from solvent fumes he burned the screens and coaxed friends to help pull the prints. As soon as they dried, red, black, and white posters in solidarity with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas covered the streets.

Today, the posters up and down 24th Street are more likely to promote commercial products than grassroots solidarity. Large posters on the sides of buildings market Hollywood movies, digital gadgets, and bottled water. But while political posters are considered vandalism, these advertising posters remain intact.

Proposition G:
No New Billboards
“They’re illegal,” said Dee Dee Workman at San Francisco Beautiful, a nonprofit organization concerned with the livability of San Francisco.

Since 1912, all general advertising, or signs that advertise commercial items sold offsite, requires a permit. Billboards and wheat pasted posters are considered general advertising. Despite this requirement, in the late ‘90s, more and more billboards went up as technology companies spent their large marketing budgets. “It was the Wild West of advertising,” said Workman.

Some of these marketing companies mimicked the guerrilla tactics of the early political posters and began wheat pasting commercial posters on construction sites and sides of buildings.

National Promotions and Advertising (NPA) is responsible for many of the wheat pasted posters across the city. Their website says, “Our posters are placed virtually anywhere — at construction sites, on framed street level boards, areas of renovation, on scaffolding, gates, fences, and barriers.” A 28” x 40” poster can be posted for two weeks for $6,448 in San Francisco. Their site adds, “To maximize effect, we can offer double or triple showings.”

Some Mission District residents like Jean Chen don’t mind these ads. “I really don’t notice them. They blend in with all the other flyers and murals I see when I walk to BART.”

This kind of campaign blends into an area like the Mission District — which has a rich history of public art.
Michael Rossman, an archivist of over 20,000 political posters, said the Bay Area was ground zero for political posters with vibrant designs created by artists at La Raza Silkscreen Center and Mission Gráfica in the Mission District.

At the height of the poster movement (1975-1989), said Rossman, “political posters were everywhere. Business owners hung them in their store windows, Modern Times staff stocked them for sale in their bookstore, and young radicals wheat pasted them on the sides of buildings.”

But all that changed with the influx of new money and corporate ads co-opting the successful public outreach, using traditional icons such as Che Guevara and mimicking the bold color and, and flat imagery reminiscent of the old wheat pasted ads of the 70s, 80s and early 90s.

Others wanted to be able to walk down the street in an ad-free environment and turned to San Francisco Beautiful to limit the amount of visual pollution in their communities. Workman found several cities throughout California that banned new billboard permits including Palo Alto, Hillsborough, Carmel, and San Diego. Other parts of the country banned all billboards: Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont.

Today, activists have the internet to spread their campaign message and fewer political artists wheat paste posters on the streets.

In 2002 Workman spearheaded Proposition G, a successful campaign banning new billboard permits that passed with an overwhelming 73 percent of the votes. But five years later, the commercial posters are still everywhere. While winning support from San Franciscans was easy, the real challenge is with enforcement of the measure.
Enforcement

Two city departments are responsible for enforcing Prop G: the Department of Public Works and the Planning Department.

DPW monitors postings on construction sites and public property. “21 inspectors regularly visit sites that have taken out street space permits. The inspectors ensure all of the conditions of the permit are met, including the to make sure there are no posting violations,” said Christine Falvey, Director of Communications and Public Affairs at DPW.

But does this really happen? After two weeks of observing a construction site at Valencia and 17th Street, wheat pasted advertising posters remained on the temporary wooden barrier encroaching on the sidewalk.

Also, Falvey admitted that DPW worked with NPA on a pilot program in 2004, two years after Prop G passed. “NPA was granted permission to post general advertising on specific abandoned buildings in exchange for keeping graffiti off these sites.”

While DPW is supposed to carry out the no posting rule on construction sites, the Planning Department enforces the rule on private property with billboard frames.

But enforcement has been difficult. Until now, it was hard to tell if a billboard had a permit or not. So this summer, a team of four full time staff walked around the city. They entered the locations of all of the billboards they found into an online map.

So far, approximately 25 percent of the signs inventoried have no record of a permit,” said Jonathan Purvis, a manager at the Planning Department. “The next step is to issue citations with the main goal of making the sign company, not the property owner, more accountable.”

A third type of posting falls into an administrative black hole: advertising on private property without billboard frames, like the fence surrounding Zeitgeist bar at Valencia and Duboce.

Purvis claims these signs fall under DPW’s responsibility since the Planning Department only monitors billboard permits. But Falvey argues they fall under the Planning Department’s responsibility because DPW doesn’t have jurisdiction over private property. While the two departments point fingers, the advertising posters thrive on city streets.

Some residents prefer commercial posters to political propaganda, which they equate with urban blight. Workman with SF Beautiful thinks otherwise. “I prefer that activist posters go up on a designated community board,” and added, “but there’s no way that one political artist can create as much visual noise as the corporate street teams who seem to transform a neighborhood over night.”

Falvey with DPW said residents could report posting violations by calling 3-1-1. ♦