Category: Update

By Josh Koehn : sfstandard – excerpt

Pour one out for a bill to keep the party going. By all appearances, SB 930 is dead.

The bill—authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Matt Haney, both of whom represent San Francisco—would have created a pilot program to allow bars in the city, Palm Springs and West Hollywood to stay open past 2 a.m.

As of Wednesday evening, SB 930 was sitting in the state Assembly’s dreaded “on call” pile, with just 28 votes in support and 29 against. It needs 41 votes to pass out of the Assembly.

The bill is now in limbo with just a week left in the legislative session. Wiener and Haney released a joint statement expressing dismay with opposition arguments they say were made in bad faith…(more)

by Joe Burn : sfstandard – excerpg

An experimental trash can has been spotted in a sorry state as the city’s pilot to select a new kind of street bin comes to the end of its first round.

The pilot’s first 30 days ends Thursday and features concept cans and off-the-shelf varieties—costing between $11,000 and $20,900. The next round begins the same day and runs for another month, according to the Department of Public Works.

The most expensive prototype can, the “Soft Square,” was spotted Wednesday with a broken hinge at the intersection of Ocean and Plymouth avenues in Ingleside. It cost $20,900 to produce…(more)

Can we just fire the person who suggested these designs for incompetence? Who did not know that the metal cans were poorly designed and the materials would not hold up as “attractive” trash cans for longer than week? Metal needs constant cleaning and repair. If you expensive cans, go for he big bellies that have trash compactors in them.

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

A state review might want to evaluate the failures of the market and the lack of funding for affordable housing. Anyone think that will happen?

In a weird way, I’m kind of glad that Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to the state to investigate his former home town’s housing approval process. For starters, if there in fact have been problems in approving new housing, a lot of them happened when Newsom and his chosen successor, Ed Lee, were running the city.

Specifically, it was Lee’s determination to convince dozens of tech companies to move here and bring thousands of high-paid employees—without any clue, any plan, and discussion at all, zero, of where to house them—that was the proximate cause of the latest in this city’s long housing crisis…

The investigation (supported by Mayor London Breed) comes just days after the state Department of Housing and Community Development sent the Planning Department its comments on the city’s draft Housing Element, which is based almost entirely on fantasy.…(more)

If you are having trouble getting through the rest of this article and getting into the RHNA weeds, all you need to know is that the voters have the option of voting some of these state and federal officials who are blaming their constituents for our lifestyle choices and for not obeying their open of thought. It may be a good time to remind these people that they are supposed to work for us not the other way around by voting them out of office.

by Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

A new crackdown on small-time dealers makes no sense—and it can’t possibly work.

Following the mayor’s political playbook, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins yesterday announced that she was going to reject a number of existing plea bargains in drug cases and seek more jail time for the sale of relatively small amounts of narcotics.

The decision flies in the face of a half-century or more of data on the impacts of the “War on Drugs” and the carceral approach to a public health issue…

It also makes no sense in San Francisco right now, when there is no room in the jails and no evidence that more arrests of small-time sellers will have any impact on fentanyl overdoses…

A conviction for drug sales is a deportable offense; under former DA Chesa Boudin, many of those cases were reduced to accessory charges—which can involve the same sentence, but without the threat of deportation.

Meanwhile, Sup. Shamann Walton said today that the city isn’t devoting anywhere near the police resources needed to address a growing homicide problem in Bay View Hunters Point:..(more)

Let’s see. We are out of cops. teachers and bus drivers. We seem to be short on just about every essential workers a city needs to function. I bet the one thing we are full of is planners. People who are working diligently to prepare a wonderful city for us that we can look forward to living in 20 years or 30 years from now, if we live that long.

If this isn’t a classic case of multiple deck chair rearranging I don’t know what is. No way are we prepared to add another 10 thousand or even 5 thousand more people to this mess. SF has become the Peyton Place of souls who go to dine on each other. In fact, the Ship of Fools may be the best description, the Hotel California. Everyone is welcome in but you can never leave.

by Thmas D. Elias : californiafocus – excerpt

There appears to be no end to the new laws that Sacramento’s dominant Democratic legislators want to pass in their effort to make California at least as dense as New York state.

Their latest effort seems likely to be as onerous – and unsuccessful – at this task as the infamous 2021 SB 9 and SB 10, which effectively end single family residence (R-1) zoning everywhere in this highly varied state. The two earlier laws – which may face a referendum to cancel them in the 2024 election – have so far had little effect.

They allow all but the smallest current R-1 lots to be split in two, with each lot eligible for a duplex and a small additional dwelling unit, also known as a “granny flat.” Cities and counties cannot nix such efforts to multiply housing units by a 6-1 ratio over current levels.

But it’s not happening on a large scale, very possibly because the state housing shortage estimates they were designed to mitigate probably are nowhere near accurate. The actual housing shortage appears to be far smaller than levels claimed by the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD)

…(more)

By Joy Wiltermuth : msn – excerpt (includes video)

MARKET EXTRA

Twitter Inc. put its large San Francisco office footprint on review for downsizing, and has nixed the opening of an office in Oakland, Calif., a person with direct knowledge of the matter said…

Cutbacks by technology giants could result in painful ramifications for San Francisco, a city with a skyline and culture dramatically reshaped in recent decades by a tech boom on its home turf, but also by staggering inequality and a homelessness crisis made worse by the pandemic…

San Francisco, already reeling from remote and relocated office workers, took a $400 million hit in tax revenue last year, according to the city’s Office of the Controller…

Tenants have been fleeing dated buildings for newer ones built since 2015 (see chart), the sole category to buck the trend of negative net absorption, or vacated space, according to Deutsche Bank. …(more)

Reader comments:

– Shorenstein Properties is having financial issues.
– Companies are abandoning older office buildings for newer ones which could indicate that older office buildings could be candidates to convert to housing.
– There is a state budget trailer bill with $150 million in grants to convert underutilized commercial to residential although I haven’t been able to find the actual trailer bill number.

I would add that funding opportunities are fleeing the state for more reliable returns elsewhere.

RELATED: It’s the end of ‘fantasyland’ for Big Tech and its workers

by Kevin Truong : sfstandard – excerpt

With a bang of the gavel, a last-ditch effort by the Board of Supervisors to override a veto by Mayor London Breed and finally pass a long-debated “fourplex” bill failed at their meeting Tuesday afternoon.

But just like a game of whack-a-mole, political defeat of the measure could mean the resurrection of an alternative that had been previously shelved.

The veto override, which required eight votes to pass, failed with a 7-4 vote. Board President Shamann Walton and Supervisors Catherine Stefani, Matt Dorsey and Ahsha Safaí voted against the initial legislation and also voted against overriding the mayor’s veto.

Championed by Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, the vetoed legislation initially sought to build on the state’s Senate Bill 9 by allowing four units on every lot in San Francisco and six on corner lots. But in its long road to passage, supervisors tacked on amendments—such as a requirement that landlords must have owned the building for five years prior to developing it—that meant it would yield very little new housing…(more)

By readers: sfrichmondreview. – excerpt

Have I just been living under a rock? What’s going on in Golden Gate Park at the Polo Field?

Are you aware that the promoters and owners of Outside Lands (I assume) have somehow convinced the city of San Francisco to pour a permanent concrete slab on a huge portion of the western end of the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park? I mean, ACTUALLY ON THE FIELD. It also looks like they are fixing to install a concrete path around the inside of the fence. Go have a look sometime, or see the attached photo. This is fixing to be a real eyesore. When did the city decide it was in the best interest of the taxpayers of this city to pour a huge unsightly slab of concrete on the beautiful (and historical) green of the Polo fields?…

From the Editor:

Here is the reply we received from the City:

“This is a renovation intended to prevent damage to the far western areas of our Polo Fields following the annual Outside Lands festival and avoid delaying the field’s reopening for athletics while we repair things like broken irrigation valves. Per the agreement, Another Planet is replacing these far western turf areas with decomposed granite (and reinforced concrete in select areas particularly prone to damage). The areas being replaced are outside the area of active field use and will not impact play.”…(more)

And no doubt some contractor needs a job.

From Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

The Board of Supes has two more meetings to finalize the fall ballot, and while some measures are clearly going to be approved, at least one critical vote is still up in the air…

Sups. Ahsha Safai, Aaron Peskin, Shamann Walton and Rafael Mandelman want to create a commission to oversee the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which sounds like a fine idea—but in committee, Sup. Connie Chan dissented because, she pointed out, the commission would be dominated by mayoral appointees.

Like a lot of activists who spoke on the measure, Chan said there’s not much point in creating a commission run by the same person who is already in charge of HSH (and who, a lot of folks say, isn’t being held accountable for its failures).

Longtime activist Jordan Davis, who lives in supportive housing, noted:When a majority of commissioners are appointed by the mayor, it leads to an untenable situation where a majority of the commission serves at the pleasure of one singular person. While all commissioners serve at the pleasure of their appointed bodies, having the HSH commission be majority board appointee means that commissioners can’t be removed because one person didn’t like their decisions…(more)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

A series of grassroots ballot initiatives for the fall will test the direction of San Francisco politics on a much greater level than the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin—and will force Mayor London Breed to make clear political choices a year before she (maybe) has to run for re-election.

Breed has already made clear that she opposes the move by Sup. Dean Preston to shift local elections to even-numbered years—a plan that would give her an extra year in office but would force her to run in the highest-turnout year of the four-year cycle…

I suspect Breed with side with the Yimbys against the supes on the competing affordable housing measures.

But two other progressive measures are almost certain to qualify, and they will force the mayor and other city officials and organizations to decide whether they are with Big Tech and the landlord lobby—or with some very reasonable reforms that are, polls show, immensely popular…(more)