Author: admin

by Annie Gaus : sfstandard – excerpt

Attorneys for the Coalition on Homelessness, which accused San Francisco officials of conducting illegal sweeps of homeless encampments, are seeking a settlement that includes filling vacant housing units and eliminating police from the enforcement of laws barring lodging in public.

“We all have a realistic sense of the potential risks and rewards of continued litigation,” wrote attorneys for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

In a letter to City Attorney David Chiu, the attorneys laid out a proposed settlement framework with several provisions, including a requirement that the city fill an estimated 1,000 vacant supportive housing units and require that empty units be filled within 30 days

The proposed settlement also includes a provision that the city spend unused funds from Proposition C and Proposition I, two ballot measures intended to boost funding for homelessness services and supportive housing, and funding for affordable housing, respectively…(more)

I would add a demand that the city open more public restrooms to allow the public, including the homeless and demand a more reliable system for picking up trash on the public streets and sidewalks. They could re-purpose the funds that were going to buy expensive new trash cans for some of these purposes.

By Diana Lambert : edsource – excerpt

School districts across the country are increasingly turning to four-day school weeks to save money, increase student attendance and recruit new teachers. But the trend isn’t taking hold in California. Only two tiny, remote California school districts, Leggett Valley Unified in Mendocino County and Big Sur Unified in Monterey County, have shortened the week for students.

The four-day week isn’t feasible for most schools in the state. California’s Education Code requires schools to hold classes five days a week or have their funding reduced. Over the years state legislators have given exemptions to a handful of school districts in remote areas of California, although they must still meet the requirement for annual instructional minutes. Some of the districts that gained approval for a four-day week have reverted to a five-day schedule and others never instituted the truncated week…(more)

By Joe Eskenazi : missionlocal – excerpt

Cruise stoped in the middle of the intersection, photo sent from reader

State likely to approve unfettered autonomous vehicle use this week, Cruise is scaling up its fleet — and cops and firefighters grumble..

Until recently, the driverless cars whirring about San Francisco were a novelty. Then they, too, grew ubiquitous. And, soon, they will be beyond ubiquitous. The California Public Utilities Commission is on Thursday scheduled to vote on allowing autonomous vehicle companies to run driverless taxis 24/7/365. That comes on the heels of a meeting today with disgruntled public safety officials.

But cops and firefighters are also disgruntled because, knowing a little something about politics, they foresee the state’s Public Utilities Commission all but certainly voting to give driverless vehicles full and unfettered access to the city — no matter what cops and firefighters say and no matter what they’ve meticulously documented.

That’s where the smart money is. Or at least lots of money — tremendous amounts of money and power are in play. Which would go a long way toward explaining this pending vote…

“How many autonomous vehicles would it take to blanket a city like San Francisco to have a disruptive service similar to Uber?” asked a participant in a July 25 earnings call for General Motors, the parent company of autonomous vehicle outfit Cruise. “Can you do it with under 1,000 to 2,000 Origins?”

“Origins” are Cruise’s large, autonomous, six-passenger vehicles that don’t come equipped with steering wheels or any trappings of human control. They look a bit like rolling shoe boxes — and they’re already here in San Francisco…(more)

REALTED:
Driverless car freezes, forcing drivers into Valencia Street center bike lane

There is a simple solution to the Robotaxi problem and people may already be gearing up to do it. Lots of workers are striking now. Just refuse to use them. The rental bikes and scooters and cars are all on life support now. There is not much room for profit, especially if they swarm the city with large numbers. Who is going to come to their aide when they are hated and despised by emergency responders? My favorite letter against them so far points out the rather obvious problem with a non-human. Humans can communicate with each other. We cannot communicate with a remote human handler. And the remote human handler is not going to be able to handle a lot of problems at one time. Why not just put the human handlers in the vehicle? They can help with luggage and groceries the way a normal taxi would. Details on the hearing here: https://metermadness.wordpress.com/robotaxis/

 

By Laya Neelakanada : sfchronicle – excerpt

Supervisor Matt Dorsey is urging San Francisco Mayor London Breed to reallocate 100% of the $18.9 million in funds budgeted for “wellness hubs” into services for people jailed on drug charges.

In a letter addressed to the mayor, Dorsey said he withdrew his support for a wellness hub in his district after it dropped supervised consumption services from its core mission.

The wellness hubs, intended to build upon the now-shuttered Tenderloin Center, were part of a strategy by the Department of Public Health to offer overdose prevention services. Instead, Dorsey advocated for moving the funds to custodial care. The proposed $18.9 million would be split across two fiscal years, with $11 million and $7.9 million, respectively.

Dorsey cited legal obstacles and the urgency of addressing substance abuse issues as reasons for reallocating funding to address “increasingly chaotic open-air drug scenes.”

“While I remain a staunch supporter of supervised consumption sites as an appropriate and necessary response to our record-shattering fatal drug overdose crisis, the inability of our city and its nonprofit partners to assume the requisite legal risks at this time to offer supervised consumption services diminishes the value of moving forward with the ‘half-loaf’ approach now contemplated by DHP for Wellness Hubs,” Dorsey wrote in his five-page letter…(more)

At least he isn’t afraid to change his mind when he loses faith in a program instead of doubling down on it. That is rare these days.

By Aldo Toledo : sfchronicle – excerpt

Families living in RVs parked near Lake Merced could soon be forced to move to other neighborhood streets so the city can break ground on critical pedestrian safety work this fall. The potential moves come as officials continue to struggle to help those living in vehicles that began to flood the neighborhood in recent years.

Four-hour weekday parking restrictions could return to Winston Drive, Lake Merced Boulevard and Buckingham Way near the San Francisco State University campus if the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency approves a request for enforcement from Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who represents the area. The area is home to dozens of largely Latino families living in RVs and other vehicles, many of whom work in the city but lost their housing during the pandemic.

Melgar wants those unhoused families to move their vehicles to a nearby street — though she didn’t identify where — while city workers finish a planned quick-build pedestrian and bike safety project along Lake Merced Boulevard, a busy street where two pedestrians have been killed since 2021. The project is set to begin in September and will eliminate about 101 parking spaces on the east side of Lake Merced Boulevard to give way for a new protected bike lane, the SFMTA said, adding that the agency will distribute flyers about the parking removal at least two weeks before work begins…(more)

By Tim Redmond :48hills – excerpt

It took a year-long Chronicle investigation, a hearing called by Sup. Dean Preston, and repeated efforts by tenants in the city’s supportive housing program to convince the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to provide a policy on how and why low-income tenants can be evicted.

Most of the evictions, which are rampant, come for non-payment of rent; Preston argued in March that nobody in San Francisco today should be evicted from a city-funded SRO hotel room because they don’t have the money for rent…

On Thursday/3, the Homlessness Oversight Commission will hold a hearing on the policy, including a presentation from the tenant organizers. They want a policy that says “must,” not “should,” and that includes mandatory arbitration:…

They also want to see limits on “nuisance” evictions to actual nuisances that impact other residents (not, for example, a tenant with a messy room).

That meeting starts at 9am in City Hall Room 416..… (more)

This is a question some of us have had questions about this for a long time. Why are supportive housing and low income housing managers moving people in and out of housing? Is there a program that encourages them to move people? We are also wondering why it is so difficult to address actual problems stemming from abusive and anti-social behavior conducted against landlords, tenants and neighbors?

Many cases of this are well-documented and have been covered by the local media. We appear to have serial abusers who somehow get themselves into place. Pay the rent for a while and then quit. Some even move out of their place but leave their stuff and refuse to vacate the place after they leave, exposing the landlord and or roommates and neighbors to expensive tactics to take back their peaceful use of their homes and or property for months while they drag out the evictions process for months in hopes of being paid to leave. When and if the perpetrators ever leave the landlords will never rent again out of fear that they might get another roommate or tenant from hell.

By Tom Elias : yahoo – excerpt

We can save our Neighborhoods

Our Neighborhood Voices got it done! On the same early July day that California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta issued a stern warning to cities and counties around the state about alleged misuse of local ‘urgency’ zoning rules designed to frustrate the increased housing density laws Bonta loves to push, the rebellion against those very laws formally began… This happened when Bonta’s own office received a new initiative designed to make local governments ? not the state ? supreme in setting housing policies and patterns… the new initiative states its purpose is to ‘protect the ability of local communities to make land use planning and zoning decisions,’ that ‘one size does not fit all’ and that ‘local land use planning or zoning initiatives approved by voters shall not be nullified or superseded by state law…(more) ourneighborhoodvoices.com

 

By Joe Eskenazi : missionlocal – excerpt

An emphatic ruling from a state public employment board has eviscerated San Francisco’s half-century-old City Charter sections forbidding public employees from striking — and enabling the city to fire workers who do.

The California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) on July 24 returned a resounding decision against the city and in favor of the Service Employees International Union 1021 and International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers Local 21. This ruling affirms — and expands — a decision last year handed down by an administrative law judge and appealed to the PERB panel.

That state panel on Monday found the charter provisions enacted following chaotic 1970s-era public employee walkouts, and subsequently modified by voters over the course of the ensuing decades, to be wholly incompatible with California law. While the state panel does not have the power to rescind portions of the San Francisco City Charter, it can — and, now has — declared significant swaths to be “void and unenforceable.” …(more)

By Greg Wong : sfexaminer – excerpt

San Francisco wants to bolster its resilience to extreme heat by improving its notoriously outdated infrastructure.

Amid one of the worst heat wWhile the marine layer insulates The City from most extreme heat, San Francisco still contains hot spots — known as urban heat islands — that absorb and retain heat due to heavy concentration of infrastructure and limited green space. This includes neighborhoods such as South of Market, Bayview, Hunters Point and Chinatown, which are also some of The City’s poorest neighborhoods.

Wolff said that through this plan, The City hopes to reduce those heat islands, build weather resilience into existing buildings and work with community-based organizations to improve their emergency response to less resourced areas.aves to bake the West in recent history, The City announced this week its first-ever plan to boost protections for residents from the effects of an increasingly warming world...(more)

I’d like to know how they plan to remove heat islands when they are buildng concrete towers and pouring concrete all over the parks, cutting down mature trees and widening sidewlaks.

sfport – excerpt

Schedule

2016 Feasibility Study (complete) | 2019 Design & Permitting (complete) | 2021 Phase 1 Construction (complete) | 2024 Phase 2 Construction

Goals

• Provide a new ferry facility to enable regional water-based public transportation and emergency response
• Provide options for regional and trans-bay transit
• Support current and future transit demand and reduce vehicular trips in the Mission Bay and Central Waterfront area
• Provide transportation resiliency in the event of an earthquake, trans-bay connectivity failure or other unplanned events
• Engage the San Francisco community in the planning process for a working Central Waterfront..(more)