Category: Update

Written by Annie Gaus, David Sjostedt : sfstandard – excerpt

An audit found a pattern of serious problems at a government-funded nonprofit that provides housing and other homelessness services, and the city’s budget office has referred the audit to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the District Attorney’s office as a criminal matter.

The audit by the San Francisco Controller’s Office found a pattern of mismanagement at United Council of Human Services (UCHS), a nonprofit providing homelessness services which has received $28 million in grants through a fiscal sponsor, Bayview Hunters Point Foundation…

It isn’t the first time the city’s budget office has found problems at UCHS.

A 2017 audit found a slew of organizational problems ranging from inexperienced board members serving longer terms than allowed, $88,140 in missing funds and a missing record of most employees who had ever worked at the company. The report presented 30 recommendations to establish more oversight at the nonprofit…(more)

by Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

The new line from the neoliberals, Big Tech, and the mayor’s allies, and we saw it all through the campaign, was “a city that works.” Now Heather Knight at the Chron has picked it up:

No, San Franciscans haven’t turned into a bunch of right-wing Donald Trump lovers as some far-left city leaders and their acolytes repeat ad nauseam on Twitter. They just want a city that works — and they’re willing to put their money behind commonsense, good-government efforts in a bid to make that a reality…

San Francisco is required to adopt a new Housing Element to the General Plan, and the state wants it to include provisions to build 84,000 new housing units over the next eight years, and 46,000 of them need to be below-market rate.

That’s impossible, unless the state and federal government dramatically increase their spending: The price tag for the affordable housing is $19 billion.

And right now, hardly any developers want to build any sort of housing in San Francisco; the costs are too high and the returns are too low to generate the kind of profits that investors demand…

And yet, the fantasy world of the Housing Element continues.

On Tuesday/15, the Board of Supes, sitting as a Committee of the Whole, will hear a presentation on the document. Two days later, the Planning Commission is slated to approve the Final Environmental Impact Report and give its nod to the new Housing Element…

Comments From lawyer Sue Hestor, who has been consistently right (and never wrong) on planning issues for 50 years:

The EIR omits an issue, which we have been underproducing housing for low-income people, for working-class people, and instead the entire incentive is to apply, approve, and build luxury housing, and that housing can’t accommodate real workers. People working in San Francisco hotels and the retail district need housing. If they are not housed in San Francisco, at rents they can afford or housing prices they can afford to buy, they will sprawl throughout the region, and that affects transportation, noise, air pollution, and all the things that we are trying to step down. Instead, we are going to worsen them…
If you want to read all of the comments and responses to the EIR, the document is here. The city planners simply say that since the Housing Element includes a lot of language about equity and racial justice, those things are going to happen…(more)

AND

The other huge, defining planning and economic issue for the city will be the focus of a set of hearing at the Budget and Finance Committee Wednesday/16: What is the city going to do about downtown?…

For more than half a century, mayors and supervisors have viewed downtown offices as the economic hope of the city. San Francisco’s entire transit system is designed to get workers from the neighborhoods to downtown. City leaders have courted not just developers but finance, insurance, and real-estate industries, then tech, to fill those towers…

Modest ideas and plans to help building owners aren’t going to work. So let me make a wild suggestion that might: Maybe downtown should be the new arts district of the world.

Anybody have a better idea?…(more)

Yeah. How about turning those towers into housing and leave the west side of the city alone. Bring back live-work zoning. Let people build their homes in the empty offices. That is what the artists did in the empty warehouses and industrial zones on the 1970’s.

By Joe Eskenazi : missionlocal – excerpt

…scroll down to Races: click on Turnout

We got the same results as the last election. Very light voting in Districts 9, 10 and 11.

Heaviest voting was in the Haight and other interior areas district 5 and 8. We must do better. Maybe the passage of Prop H will help get people to the polls…(more)

by David Mamaril Horowitz : 48hills – excerpt

This story is being updated through Wednesday evening.

Traffic was halted on Franklin Street as well over 200 educators across some 20 school sites filled the street in front of the school district headquarters at 3 p.m. to protest the Empower pay crisis. Chants quickly overpowered the music.

“What do we want?” shouted Evelyn Sanchez, a teacher at San Francisco Community School and a protest organizer.

“Paychecks!” responded the crowd.

“When do we want them?”

“Now!”

More than 3,000 educators have been impacted across the San Francisco School District by the EMPowerSF payroll debacle, according to Alvarez & Marsal, the firm recently hired to assess and fix the EmPowerSF payroll system.

At the corner of 555 Franklin St., teachers took turns at the mic to share their stories…(more)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Board members furious that the Felton Institute refused to answer questions at a hearing on union-contract issues.

A social-service nonprofit that gets more than $20 million a year in public money from San Francisco is engaged in a union struggle—and has refused to discuss the situation with the Board of Supervisors.

SEIU Local 1021 is trying to organize workers at The Felton Institute, which provides a wide range of social and behavioral health services, and union members say they are facing resistance.

But when the supes Government Audit and Oversight Committee held a hearing on the issue last week, nobody from Felton was willing to answer questions…

“They do good work,” Melgar told me. “But they have to be fair to their workers. And the best way to make sure that happens is for all the workers to have a union.”…(more)

How can they be doing good work when they are ripping off their employees?

By Tomasita Medál and Nicky Tresviña : eltecolote – excerpt

San Francisco needs to be more accessible as a city, not less so, write guest commentators on Propositions for the upcoming election.

There are two items on this November’s ballot that greatly impact our community’s ability to have equal access to all of the amenities along JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park as well as easy access to Ocean Beach and the VA Hospital coming from the Mission, Excelsior, and Bayview on the Upper Great Highway.

Proposition I would restore car access to JFK Drive and Upper Great Highway to pre-Covid days, keeping JFK Drive accessible to everyone 24/7, except Sundays and holidays and some Saturdays in Spring and Summer. This returns JFK Drive to the SHARED space initiated in 1967.

Proposition J would close JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park 24/7 EVERY day of the year, permanently. It reserves JFK Drive only for the exclusive use of bicyclists! The road was designed to bring everyone to the Rose Garden, the Conservatory of Flowers, the Dahlia Garden, the Rhododendron Dell, the waterfall, the Academy of Sciences, and the deYoung Museum. Since Mayor Breed cited the pandemic as a reason to close JFK Drive 24/7, countless families from distant neighborhoods, with elders, disabled members, and young children have been excluded from all of the amenities along JFK Drive. These include winter night sights such as the Conservatory of Flowers light show and the “Enchanted Garden” neon forest installation…

We are saddened to see how our city has become so uncaring about the impact of these road closures on our vulnerable communities.

It’s easy for the able-bodied to dismiss the needs of those with disabilities, but we will all become elders eventually. Please have compassion for those more vulnerable than you. For these reasons, we urge you to register to vote and vote Yes on I and NO on J. This vote will impact generations to come.… (more)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Martha Goldin asks for inquiry into the DA’s paid work for nonprofits that were tightly linked to the Boudin recall campaign.

A retired Superior Court judge who lives in San Francisco has filed a detailed complaint with the state Bar Association claiming that District Attorney Brooke Jenkins lied about her work for supporters of the Chesa Boudin recall.

The complaint focuses on information that has been reported widely, in the most detail by Michael Barba at the SF Standard. After quitting her job at a prosecutor after a dispute with Boudin, her then boss, about whether a mentally ill person should be sent to a hospital or to prison, she began to work for three nonprofits…(more)

by Josh Koehn : sfstandard – excerpt

Two nonprofits working to keep JFK Drive and the Great Highway car-free appeared to skirt IRS and election rules this summer when they solicited tax-deductible donations to fund a campaign fight that has consumed City Hall for more than a year.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and Walk San Francisco, which receive city funding and advocate for safer streets for cyclists and pedestrians, respectively, sent emails in July encouraging their members to make tax-free donations for the election battle on whether cars should return to the coveted roadways.

While 501c3 nonprofits can advocate on political issues and ballot measures, the money used to fund these campaigns has to be properly reported, and this money cannot be used for tax write-offs.

The proponents of Proposition I, which seeks to return vehicle access to the Great Highway in the Sunset and JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park, claimed in complaints filed with the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) and the San Francisco Ethics Commission that the nonprofits violated these laws. Both the Bicycle Coalition and Walk SF support Prop. J, which would codify an ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors to keep the roadways car-free, a move that occurred early in the pandemic…(more)

I appears that other campaign rules are being broken if the scene is in a city hall meeting. I thought people are not allowed to bring campaign signs into the meetings. Did that rule change? May we all show up with signs now?

By David Lawder : reuters – excerpt

WASHINGTON, Oct 7 (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury moved to preserve and expand the supply of affordable housing on Friday by finalizing a new tax credit income rule that may qualify more housing projects and extending deadlines for when they must be placed in service.

The finalized income-averaging rule for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit now allows a broader mix of income levels among residents of qualifying projects, by using an average, rather than fixed limits for all units.

The rule clarifies a 2018 law passed by Congress to allow developers more flexibility in qualifying for the credits.

Previously, projects qualifying for the tax credit, which can offset up to 70% of an affordable housing project’s costs, needed to make at least 20% of the units available to residents earning 50% of the local area’s median income (AMI) or 40% of the units at 60% of AMI.

A Treasury official said the new regulation allows for at least 40% of a project’s units to meet an average of 60% of AMI — allowing more higher-income tenants to mix with lower-income residents…(more)

Can this help build more affordable housing and make a dent in the “penciling in” argument? Why does this feel like a déjà vu moment? Haven’t we seen this script before?