Category: Update

By J.D. Morris : sfchronicle – excerpt

San Francisco legislators have put the brakes on a project that would replace a single-family Nob Hill home with 10 townhomes after neighbors objected in part because they said the proposed complex would cast too much shadow on an adjacent public recreation center.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday overturned the city Planning Commission’s previous decision that the proposed redevelopment of 1151 Washington St. did not need an environmental review because it met the standard for an exemption under state law.

Opponents argued the site had contaminated soils that required closer study, and the townhomes would excessively shade the nextdoor Betty Ann Ong Recreation Center’s basketball courts and playground at their hours of peak use, among other concerns.

Supervisors sided with the critics in a 7-4 vote that sent the question of the project’s environmental impacts back to planning officials for further analysis…(more)

R

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Governor’s Office, in highly unusual move, lobbies local Planning Commission on Breed legislation.

In a highly unusual move, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Office is lobbying the San Francisco Planning Commission to approve a plan by Mayor London Breed that could lead to the wholesale demolition of existing housing on the West Side of the city.

Newsom’s Department of Housing and Community Development sent a letter June 16 to the SF Planning Commission urging support for the “Constraints Reduction Ordinance.”

That position is consistent with Newsom’s position on housing: The biggest problem, the governor insists, is that cities put too many rules on new development. His entire housing policy, such as it is, involves “constraint reduction.”

The letter, signed by Melinda Coy, who has the title of “proactive housing accountability chief” (I bet Newsom came up with that himself), states that…(more)

Read the article and comment if you can. Probably some well place letters to the editor may help. There is an effort to meet with supervisors to try to convince them that this is a big political mistake. The voters have already lost faith and trust in the government so removing more rights to participate in the future of the city will not endear them to the Mayor or anyone who supports less rights for citizens.

The San Francisco Standard – a live discussion about London Breed and the future of SF

Dear Reader,

Plenty of ink has been spilled about San Francisco’s problems. Less is understood about what drives the leader at the center of it all: Mayor London Breed.

From humble beginnings in one of the city’s toughest public housing projects, Breed’s life was deeply shaped by the crises now roiling San Francisco: drugs, poverty and mental illness. The Standard’s revealing, in-depth portrait of her improbable rise to power depicts a charismatic and sincere leader whose sharpest traits can cut both ways.

Over six months and through dozens of interviews with Breed’s friends, neighbors, colleagues and political adversaries, The Standard’s senior political reporter Josh Koehn unravels the mayor’s personal and political struggles as she faces perhaps her biggest challenge yet: solving San Francisco’s generational problems and winning over voters in a time of unprecedented upheaval.

At noon on Thursday, June 22, Senior Editor Annie Gaus and Koehn will host a live discussion of the story and what it reveals about Breed and the future of San Francisco. Please join us on Twitter Spaces and follow the @SFStandard and @Josh_Koehn to stay informed.

—Annie Gaus and Josh Koehn

Forgive repeats and please share:

6/29 10AM
STOP The Madness-Newsom’s CPUC To Give Approval Of 24 hour Robo Taxis In SF

fightbacksaveccsf13

by Griffin Jones and Eleni Balakrishnan : missionlocal – excerpt

San Francisco’s efforts to eradicate downtown open-air drug markets and reduce historic overdose rates ramped up in the last month with announcements that police and 130 sheriff’s deputies will be deployed to increase arrests.

The new push is part of an ongoing strategy that will, as of today, include the opening of an in-person Drug Market Agency Coordination Center near Civic Center to coordinate “engagement, enforcement, and treatment” of drug use and sales, according to the mayor’s office.

Will it work? It depends on the goal.

Interviews conducted by Mission Local with 14 public defenders, district attorneys, criminal justice experts and public health workers locally and around the country yielded a common refrain: Waves of arrests for misdemeanor drug crimes have been tried — and have failed.

That is, they failed if the aim of arrests was to curb addiction, reduce suffering and save lives.

However, some said, if the goal is to sweep drug use from public view, then there is an outside chance a wave of arrests could work…

Noting the effects of broken windows policing in New York City in the early ‘90s, a practice widely considered to be harmful by civil rights activists, Moskos said that, in testing the protocol first on the subway, the city found that the presence of cops alone was an effective damper on subway crime …(more)

RELATED:

Broken Windows Policy: https://guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/nypd/brokenwindows

By Jordan Parker, St. John Berned Smith : sfchronicle – excerpt
UPDATE: Police ID person of interest also sought in Oakland killing

As neighbors described a chaotic scene, San Francisco police searched for clues Saturday after a mass shooting injured nine people during a block party in the Mission District the night before…

The shooting, which police described as “targeted and isolated,” occurred shortly after 9 p.m. Friday during a block party to mark the sixth anniversary of Dying Breed, a store specializing in local clothing designs, graffiti supplies, and parties and events.

The SFPD later identified Javier Campos as a person of interest in the case. Surveillance video recorded a Mercedes associated with Campos fleeing the area of the shooting, and the gunfire came from the car, police said.

Campos, who police said has ties with Sureño gang members, has “numerous” firearms warrants from San Mateo and Alameda counties. He also has an outstanding arrest warrant for homicide in Oakland, police said…

A Cruise self-driving car wandered into the crime scene Friday night and appeared to block emergency responders as they aided the victims…(more)

By Claire Hao : sfchronicle – excerpt

When will San Franciscans be able to know whether their office or apartment buildings are at risk in a major earthquake?

The city does keep a list, published last month by NBC News, of 3,400 buildings believed to be concrete that could be at risk of collapsing in a major earthquake.

• Earthquake tracker: Mapping the latest quakes in California and across the world

Concrete buildings could account for 50% of deaths in a 1906-size earthquake in San Francisco, according to a 2010 city-commissioned study. They are one of the most significant kinds of buildings yet to be retrofitted for earthquake safety in San Francisco and are located on nearly every block in downtown, the Tenderloin and Chinatown.

But city officials and structural engineers caution that this list is preliminary and inaccurate — which is why The Chronicle is not publishing it.

A better list will come, according to Brian Strong, director of the city’s Office of Resilience and Capital Planning, only after the Board of Supervisors passes a seismic retrofit ordinance for concrete buildings, which city staff are currently developing and plan to have before the board by the beginning of next year.

“We can’t compel property owners to give us information on their buildings without going to the Board of Supervisors,” Strong said…(more)

By Heather Knight : sfchronicle – excerpt

As San Francisco stares down a state mandate to build 82,000 new housing units within eight years, an 80-something retired architect has a great solution. It’s called Domicity.

Just a few blocks from Ocean Beach, in San Francisco’s sleepy, foggy Outer Sunset neighborhood, sits a little slice of Paris — or as close to it as one can get among the endless rows of single-family homes in varying shades of beige.

At 44th Avenue and Noriega Street sits Gus’s Community Market. Trees, picnic tables and green umbrellas primed for unlikely sunshine line the sidewalks alongside wooden stands brimming with colorful flowers, artichokes and melons.

Above the shop sit three stories of housing, giving the bustling market more customers and the city more desperately needed homes. All in all, the pleasant corner offers a touch of the European flair two supervisors want to see replicated in their districts, swaths of San Francisco that have not shouldered their weight in helping the city address its housing crisis.

Now, Supervisors Myrna Melgar and Joel Engardio — who represent District Seven’s West of Twin Peaks area and District Four’s Sunset neighborhood, respectively — are pushing their sometimes resistant constituents to support far more Gus-style buildings. And they’re teaming up to pass legislation that could help make it a reality…

One sign that west side seniors are coming around to Lew’s idea: George Wooding, a 67-year-old homeowner in District Seven and the president of the Midtown Terrace Home Owners Association, has long opposed plans to build more housing near him, but he’s grudgingly supportive of Lew.

“Times are changing,” Wooding conceded. “He’s way ahead of everybody else. He’s a visionary as opposed to somebody just trying to make money.”…(more)

Since Domicity as introduced to CSFN it appears that a few changes were added to the program. The designs are still a formula that involves mixed use 6 story buildings that may be customized for different purposes, and if memory serves, Lew plans to use lightweight wood products and avoid the need for heavier concrete and steel structures by limiting the buildings to six stories. There is now a nonprofit funding program based on the idea that a lot of senior homeowners want to downsize. Lew may be a visionary but his partners may rub some the wrong way.

by Joe Burn, George Kelly :sfstandard – excerpt

San Francisco is set to open a new unified command center to combat open-air drug dealing in the Downtown area, city officials said Friday.

The new center to combat the drug crisis will be named the Drug Market Agency Coordination Center (DMACC), according to the Department of Emergency Management, which will work with San Francisco police and the Department of Public Health to operate the center.

An emergency management department spokesperson confirmed the center would open within the next two weeks at a location on Market Street near Civic Center. The exact location will not be disclosed due to security risks.

The emergency management department says the coordinated effort has been in place since April 17 but will move from a virtual to a physical in-person center, allowing the different agencies, including federal and state partners, to work more closely together to direct resources to disrupt open-air drug markets more effectively.

New data collection strategies will also be implemented to produce monthly reports on outputs and outcomes related to disrupting San Francisco drug markets…(more)

This sounds suspciouly like the request made by Supervisor Peskin. Hope it works regardless of who thought of it.

By Sarah Holtz : sfstandard – excerpt (published 1/4/2023)

I’ve always been a firm believer in harm reduction. The way I see it, legalizing safe consumption sites and giving people access to fentanyl test strips and Narcan (a brand name for the overdose-reversal drug naloxone) will only serve to make our community safer.

On New Year’s Eve, as I prepared to head to a house party where I figured some might use recreational drugs—and thus put themselves at risk of accidentally overdosing on fentanyl—I went out in search of test strips and naloxone. With test strips, I could help people identify if drugs were laced with fentanyl. With Narcan, I might be able to help reverse an inadvertent overdose.

I figured it’d be an easy errand. I was wrong…

I knew that local nonprofit FentCheck has an online map of sites that distribute free test strips…

The irony of striking out at the pharmacy and the hospital, only to find the potentially life-saving resource I was looking for at a neighborhood bar, left me with more questions than answers…

So I called up Alison Heller, co-founder of FentCheck. Driven by a desire to confront the FentCheck crisis, Heller attended EMT school before starting FentCheck. She told me that when she started her organization, fentanyl test strips were considered drug paraphernalia. She and her co-founder Dean Shold worked hard with lawmakers to help declassify them. …(more)

Good to know that there is a simple test and where it is available. More information on the tests may be avoid the need for so much Narcan. Detailed information on what to look for should be distributed more widely.