Category: News

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Planning Commission rejects landlord plan to convert SRO rooms to tourist hotels

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

In a huge victory for tenants, the Planning Commission rejected tonight a permit that would have allowed a residential hotel owner to convert 72 rent-controlled units to tourist use.

The voted sent a clear message to landlords: The city won’t reward you for intentionally keeping low-cost units off the market.

The vote was 5-2, with Commissioners Amy Campbell and Sean McGarry, both appointees of former Mayor London Breed, siding with the landlord...(more)

RELATED:
Commissioners also voted to support Connie Chan’s noticing legislation that seeks to return to the more traditional public noticing system.

 

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S.F. homeless families to be evicted despite reassurance from Lurie

By Xueer Lu : missionlocal – excerpt

Update: Hours after publication, both families won another temporary extension, meaning they will not face eviction again until mid-April…

 

 

 

Two steps forward and four steps back. How do we get back through the looking glass?

In last-minute reversal, S.F. homeless families avoid eviction — for now.

Two San Francisco families who were set to be evicted from their homeless shelters on Monday night have won a reprieve following protests by advocates and several press stories highlighting their plight, according to Matt Alexander, an advocate working with the families.

The families of Vilma Arias and Maria Flores, two in a group of some 30 families who are facing eviction after San Francisco reintroduced a cap on the number of nights families can stay in city-contracted homeless shelters, were told to be out of their rooms at St. Joseph Family Center by 5 p.m. tonight.

If not, shelter staff told the families, the police would be called…(more)

Whiplash politics from Washington to SF! What gives? Why don’t they do us all a favor and DO NOTHING! That is the cheapest least chaotic way to end this mind-bogging confusion we are in. Did something happen to our leaders? Did power go to their head or what? Who said we wanted mass change? I thought the public voted for border security and safe streets and an end to inflation. Nothing they are doing is gong to fix those problems!

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California is embracing psychiatric hospitals again. Behind locked doors, a profit-driven system is destroying lives

By Cynthia Dizikes and Joaquin Palomino : sfchronicle – excerpt (audio)

California is embracing psychiatric hospitals again. Behind locked doors, a profit-driven system is destroying lives…

Soon after taking office in 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to finally fix a crisis that had come to define California. Emergency rooms were overflowing with people routed by depression, drug addiction and psychosis, many with unstable housing and nowhere to go except the streets.

“This is California’s original sin,” Newsom would say, pointing to decades of government mistakes and neglect that had left the state with a severe shortage of psychiatric treatment beds and narrow restrictions on who could be forced into them. “This is the manifestation of our failure.”

For the first time in a generation, California would pour billions of dollars into mental health facilities while making it easier to lock people in some of them. Those who had long been overlooked, Newsom pledged, would receive stabilizing medication and therapy to help them return to their communities, families, schools and careers.

 Yet a Chronicle investigation has found that the institutions Newsom’s administration is increasingly relying on are themselves a public health catastrophe…(more)

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San Francisco’s commission-cutting committee kicks off

 : sfexaminer – excerpt (audio)

    The work of figuring out how to pare back San Francisco’s dozens of commissions has begun.
    On Wednesday afternoon, the five members of The City’s newly formed Commission Streamlining Task Force gathered together in a City Hall meeting room. Among their first orders of business were figuring out some basics — things like when they’ll meet, how many commissions there are in The City, and how task force members should go about evaluating those bodies to determine which to keep, which to cut and which to reform.

Ed Harrington has been appointed to chair the task force, which was created by November’s Proposition E. In a recent interview, Harrington told The Examiner that before any reform decisions can be made, the task force must first answer some fundamental questions: “What makes a good commission? What are the kinds of commissions we’re trying to do in San Francisco, and how do we make them as strong as possible?”… (more)

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S.F. could make it easier for small businesses to bid on city contracts

By Aldo Toledo : sfchronicle – excerpt (audio)
 

San Francisco officials want to streamline the city’s notoriously byzantine contracting process to make it faster and more efficient and open the doors to more small businesses currently shut out of bidding for work.

Businesses that want city contracting work have to sign a 31-page list of terms and conditions, many of which are duplicative of state law, irrelevant or downright confusing. While large corporations can devote time and resources to the city’s process, small businesses often can’t…

But Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman wants to change that by updating the process for small businesses entering into contracts under $230,000 by standardizing or repealing a slew of esoteric rules in the city code.

Dubbed the Open For Business Contract Streamlining Act, Mandelman’s legislation is based on City Administrator recommendations from last year, which seek to end the “high level of administrative burden for both City staff and suppliers…

For Paul Pendergast, president of Build It, the largest industry association of LGBTQ and allied construction, architecture and engineering firms,  the changes could entice more bidders who may have been turned off by the city’s onerous rules.

“Anything the city can do to get more businesses to bid on contracts we are in favor of,” he said… (more)

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Can one man help wipe out S.F.’s drug markets? City officials want to find out

By Maggie Angst : sfchronicle – excerpt
 

David Kennedy has devoted his life to developing new approaches to curb gun violence and dismantle open drug markets.

In Boston, interventions adopted under Kennedy’s direction led to a 63% decline in youth homicides. And in High Point, N.C., the city almost entirely eliminated open drug use and dealing over three years and saw a steep decline in violent crime, according to studies.

So could Kennedy — a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and founder of the National Network for Safe Communities — help San Francisco eradicate its relentless open-air drug markets?

Some city officials want to find out. …

Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, with the support of Board President Rafael Mandelman and Supervisor Matt Dorsey, will make a formal request to Mayor Daniel Lurie and the board on Tuesday to hire Kennedy as an independent contractor to analyze San Francisco’s open-air drug markets and create an intervention plan tailored to the city. …

Dorsey also plans to introduce legislation Tuesday to codify that the city’s “primary objective” of its drug policies is to stop illicit drug use and help people attain long-term recovery from addiction. The legislation, in part, is meant to address concerns from some residents and city leaders that it is too focused on harm reduction and not enough on treatment. Dorsey made a request in late 2022 to bring in Kennedy, and the professor developed a proposal to address the city’s illicit drug markets, but the deal was never finalized. The estimated cost of the two-year initiative at that time was about $550,000, according to city records…

Kennedy’s strategy — referred to as “Drug Market Intervention” — calls for disrupting the supply of drugs into the market and creating a maintenance plan to ensure the market stays closed. His team saw success in cities like High Point, N.C. and Nashville during the crack epidemic, but he told the Chronicle that addressing San Francisco’s current markets, which are dominated by the sale of the cheap, highly addictive synthetic opioid fentanyl, will likely require its own unique approach.

“I’m not presuming that any of the particular tactics that worked for the crack era markets will work here,” Kennedy said in an interview. “But I wouldn’t be agreeing to work with the city if I didn’t think that there was real promise here.”…

To guide Kennedy’s work, Mahmood is proposing to expand the city’s Drug Market Agency Coordination Center, a public safety interagency task force started under Breed, to a 24/7 operation to arrest more overnight drug dealers. He also wants to see the city add more street ambassadors to deter drug markets from popping up in new areas and increase support for workforce and youth development programs to prevent young people from getting pulled into the drug trade. … (more)

RELATED:

In SF’s Move to Give Mayor Daniel Lurie Extra ‘Fentanyl’ Powers, This One Phrase Stood Out, “‘The will of the voters.’ Crime is down, drug deaths are lower, but a so-called emergency measure continues a rollback of permissive policies.”

It was be good see a critique of Kennedy’s work. How successful has his strategy been?

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Cal Fire’s new fire risk maps mean big changes for California homeowners

By Julie Johnson and Harsha Devulapalli : sfchronicle – energy (interactive map)

Cal Fire on Monday published updated fire maps for 125 cities from the Bay Area north to the Oregon border.

California fire officials released long-awaited maps on Monday showing fire risk in cities across the Bay Area and along the northern coast of California.

The maps, which are still in draft form, will have major implications: They will guide where stricter fire-resistant building and landscape rules apply, and are an update to fire risk maps issued more than a decade ago. For example, the state’s pending ban of plants and other combustible materials within five feet of homes will apply to properties categorized on the new maps (i.e., in local responsibility areas) as having “very high fire severity hazard.” That includes parts of Bay Area cities like Berkeley, Oakland, Tiburon, Mill Valley, Santa Rosa, San Bruno, San Jose and Palo Alto…

The maps are not expected to change how insurance companies weigh fire risk and make policy decisions, according to the California Department of Insurance. The department published a Q&A about the maps that said insurance companies are required to provide “discounts for wildfire safety actions such as community mitigation and home-hardening, which Cal Fire’s maps do not assess.”

“Insurance companies are already using risk analysis tools and models that go beyond Cal Fire’s proposed maps in determining what properties they will underwrite,” the department said….

The maps do not take account of homeowners’ mitigation efforts.

Last year, Cal Fire published new fire hazard maps for the areas of the state it protects, which includes most but not all of non-incorporated California, dubbed “state responsibility areas.” All homes in these areas must adhere to the state’s strictest fire-safe standards for buildings and landscapes, including the state’s upcoming “zone zero” landscape rules that will require homeowners to keep five feet around their homes clear of most plants and other flammable materials like bark mulch.

Cal Fire developed the new draft maps using scientific models that evaluated factors like terrain and vegetation. These new models found the risk of fire had grown in cities and towns, and expanded by 1.4 million acres the California areas designated as either “high” or “very high” fire hazard… (more)

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SF says celebrity chef walked away from two Union Square cafes

By Patrcik Hoge : sfexaminer – excerpt (audio)

Celebrity chef Tyler Florence stepped away from a role operating two cafes in Union Square last week right before the start of the NBA All-Star weekend, according to San Francisco officials who nevertheless said the downtown shopping district put on a good show for tourists in town for the basketball event and associated attractions.

As a result of Florence’s departure, city officials hastily recruited a celebrated local baker who provided pastries over the weekend and on Tuesday at one of the two kiosks leased by The City to Florence, though the woman said she did not know what would happen going forward.

Florence’s company was granted a three-year lease for The City’s properties in 2023. Efforts to get comment from Florence or someone at his company were unsuccessful…

As with the recent NBA All-Star Game, Breed and others at the time were eager for The City to put a favorable foot forward for another high-profile gathering, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, as well as for the winter holidays.

To that end, The City’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development gave Florence a grant of $440,000 to get the eateries up and running. The award rankled some who said the money had been earmarked for revitalizing lower Powell Street.

City supervisors last year subsequently voted to accept $2 million more in state grant money for upgrading the restaurant kiosks that Florence took over… (more)

Ever wonder where those millions are coming from and where they are going? Here are some hints for those who care to follow up on them.
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Airbnb founder now working with Musk; here’s who was on his side in SF when it mattered

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

You know you are repeating past mistakes when past warnings confirm the threats of the past were real.  This video was shot at one of the first Airbnb demonstrations held in SF about a decade ago. All the warnings were ignored. And now here we are being overtaken by the cute little struggling tech startups we warned against. And who was around to campion them?

Breed, Chiu, and Wiener helped make Joe Gebbia a billionaire; now he’s helping destroy democracy in the US.
 

Now that Joe Gebbia, the billionaire co-founder of Airbnb, is joining Elon Musk’s attempt to dismantle the federal government, I would like to remind everyone of a little history.

Airbnb was started in San Francisco, and for its first few years, every single listing in this city was illegal. The company’s entire business model was illegal. It was also deeply damaging to tenants, many of whom lost their homes so the place could be turned into a hotel room…

Ed Lee was the mayor. He did nothing, nothing, to enforce the city laws against short-term rentals. Airbnb was a tech company; the mayor loved tech companies. His administration also did nothing to stop Uber and Lyft, which were violating city law every single day.

In those days, if you were a tech startup, you didn’t have to worry about local laws. Move fast, break things; it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Never mind if you are ruing the lives of low-income renters and struggling cab drivers; they don’t count… (more)

Not much has changed except the coddled cute little techies that needed room to grow have outgrown SF and jumped from local to state to national destruction. When is enough enuf? Share this one if you can.

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San Francisco’s Right-Wing Tech Bros Go National

By Lincoln Mitchell : excerpt

Many of the acsendant crypto-goniffs in Washington have roots in San Francisco.

As recently as a few years ago many would have indentified San Francisco as the capital of liberal, or at least Democratic, America. The Vice-President was from the Bay Area and had gotten her start in elected office in San Francisco. One former mayor of San Francisco was the governor of California and an emerging national leader of the Democratic Party. Another former mayor was an aging, but groundbreaking, US Senator. The Speaker of the House and longtime leader of her party in that chamber was San Francisco’s congresswoman. This was still a time when people would, inaccurately, say things like a conservative in San Francisco was a radical in the rest of America.

Over the last few years, something began to change. In San Francisco, right-wing politics reemerged, initially in the form of self-styled feel-good civic groups sneaking conservative messaging into other fora-come for the garbage clean-up and the opportunity to mingle with other young singles, and stay for the right-wing spin about San Francisco…(more)

First thing they said was, “Parking isn’t a right it is a privilege.” Second thing they said was, “Disruption is good before it forces change.” After that the systems all fell apart. If the author is right, the country  will soon look like San Francisco. We were the Petri dish.