Category: Update

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)

Board of Appeals [agenda]

• This normally sleepy body has a real live one this Wednesday. The infamous Sunset Skyscraper project is up for a decision, with the board hearing an appeal of the Planning Department’s rejection of the project.

  As we reported this month, there are some red flags with the project. It’s also become a major lightning rod in housing debates, both locally and statewide.

  Given the likelihood of impassioned commentary, the skyscraper hearing is at the end of the agenda. It’s also been delayed multiple times, at the request of the developer.

New information regarding the attorneys and the proponents of this case are turning this into quite a saga. We anticipate this hearing is the first of a few to come.

By Calmatters : ocregister – excerpt (includes audio track)

Losing income is the No. 1 reason Californians end up homeless – and the vast majority of them say a subsidy of as little as $300 a month could have kept them off the streets.

That’s according to a new study out of UC San Francisco that provides the most comprehensive look yet at California’s homeless crisis.

In the six months prior to becoming homeless, the Californians surveyed were making a median income of just $960 a month. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in California is nearly three times that, according to Zillow. And though survey participants listed a myriad of reasons why they lost their homes, more people cited a loss of, or reduction in, income than anything else.

The study’s authors say the findings highlight the idea that money, more than addiction, mental health, poor decisions or other factors, is the main cause of – and potential solution to – homelessness.

“I think it’s really important to note how desperately poor people are, and how much it is their poverty and the high housing costs that are leading to this crisis,” said Margot Kushel, a physician who directs the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, which conducted the study.

Already the study – which the authors say is the most representative homelessness survey conducted in the U.S. since the mid-1990s – has drawn attention from high places…(more)