Page 13 - IAV Digital Magazine #541

'F—k yo Turkey Sub': Subway Store In Oakland Keeps Getting Targeted With Graffiti
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
By Susana Guerrero, SFGAT E
It's been a tough few weeks for the Oakland Subway store at 6341 Shattuck Ave., which has been the target of ongoing vandal- ism.
Manager Peter Singh said that the store has dealt with back- to-back graffiti since last month. He said he’s felt demoralized after the vandalism began to ramp up more recently.
“We are really tired of this,” Singh told SFGATE. “It’s just a bad start to the day when you see graffiti all over and you paint it and see it again. It’s painful.”
On Friday, neigh- boring business Nick’s Pizza post- ed a photo on
its Instagram sto- ries with the most recent vandalism to the Subway location, which is just across the street. In the post, Nick Yapor-Cox, owner of Nick’s Pizza, shared his
disappointment after witnessing countless graffiti incidents on his neighbor’s store- front and included a photo of the defaced building that read, “F—k yo turkey sub.”
“It kept coming back and it feels like harassment,” Yapor-Cox told SFGATE. “I think someone thinks that they’re being funny. To me it’s not acknowledg- ing that there’s a person behind there, not a nameless corpo- ration.”
Yapor-Cox added that he’s seen tagging on Subway at least five times within the past few weeks and that while he’s observed tagging on buildings throughout the city, he hasn’t seen other busi- nesses in the neighborhood that have been target- ed in the same way.
Singh told SFGATE that each time the business has new graffiti, it’s usually on the side of the
building that faces Alcatraz Avenue. He said that it’s cost them about $100 each time to paint over.
As KQED report- ed in 2015, it is the responsibility of the property owner to remove graffiti on their own. According
to Oakland Municipal Code 8.10.200, proper- ty owners have 10 days to remove graffiti from buildings and if they fail to do so, they will be fined $150. Oakland has
a graffiti abate-
ment program that helps handle vandalism made to public proper- ties and it states on its website that it offers a one- time
courtesy graffiti removal for pri- vate properties, but the
city encourages business
owners to file
a nonemergency police report with the Oakland Police Department or report the issue on OAK311. Since the start of 2022, there has been more than 200 graffiti com- plaints made to OAK311, accord- ing to Oakland’s Open Data. During 2021, there were more than 2,700 com- plaints made to the service request site.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine