Over three months, Shirley Luo, owner of the Won Kee Market in Oakland’s Chinatown, racked up more than $3,000 in fines from the city.
The reason? Luo wasn’t cleaning the graffiti that constantly appears on the back wall, fence and awning of her business as fast as the city wanted.
Luo said that even when she and her staff at the neighborhood market, which she has operated for the past decade, clean graffiti from their building, more appears within days. In addition to fines, business owners are on the hook for payments to the city to reinspect their business after getting the first notice…