Category: Update

By Mallory Moench : sfchronicle – excerpt

A San Francisco ballot measure meant to tax Amazon won’t go before voters in November, after its backers realized the measure might not apply to the e-commerce giant and a judge ruled they can pull it from the ballot.

The backers of the ballot measure went to court over the issue after city officials and community members told them not only might it not apply to Amazon, but it could ensnare hundreds of small businesses and reduce general city revenue…(more)

By Alastair Bland : estuarynews – excerpt

In the mountains and foothills of California, an enduring drought has depleted the state’s major reserves of water. There is virtually no snowpack, and most of the state’s large reservoirs are less than 40 percent full. But in the central Sierra Nevada, a trio of artificial lakes remain flush with cold mountain water. The largest of them, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, from which millions of Bay Area residents receive water, is more than 80 percent full.

This remarkable plentitude is the outcome of careful planning by the agency that manages the Yosemite National Park reservoir plus conservation by Bay Area residents, who use less water per capita than most other people in the state—between 35 and 65 gallons per person per day. The statewide average is 82 gallons.

But some environmental advocates are hardly cheering San Francisco’s water conservation success. Instead, they’re accusing the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission of hoarding its water through an excessively conservative management plan they say harms the environment and benefits almost no one—not even the city dwellers who use the water…(more)

by David Sjostedt : sfstandard – excerpt

A new program slated to open in September will provide housing for criminal defendants awaiting trial in San Francisco with the goal of steering them towards sobriety and a path to a job.

The 564 6th Street SoMa facility will offer temporary lodging, along with mental health and job support, to people released from San Francisco jails. Run by Adult Probation, Episcopal Community Services and the Pretrial Diversion Project, the state-funded program will provide up to 30 beds for an initial trial period of one year.

The $483,701 pilot aims to fill a gap for the roughly one-third of people released from jails who are homeless, according to Adult Probation. It’s an evolution of a Covid-era effort that used hotel rooms as temporary shelter for people released from jail during the peak of the pandemic.

“We’ll knock on a tent with a cup of coffee and a doughnut and get them ready for court,” said David Mauroff, CEO of the Pretrial Diversion Project. “Detention is not a solution to our housing problem, our mental health problem and our substance abuse problem. The answer lies in partnerships like this.”…(more)

Does this give more homeless people a reason to misbehave so they will go t the head of the housing list? Is this a solution or an excuse to try a new tactic and who does it prioritize the right people for housing? It is hard to know what is going on as City lunges from one “new idea” to the next. It feels like they are throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Do they reward anyone who comes up with an tried program?

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Fast-track bill would override state regulation and give criminal utility taxpayer money for a plant that isn’t safe—and guv wants a vote this week.

Gov. Gavin Newsom just released an immensely complicated bill that includes stunning taxpayer giveaways to PG&E, changes the way energy prices are set in California, and would keep alive a nuclear power plant that is not only aging but no longer meets federal safety standards.

And he’s asking the state Legislature to vote on it Wednesday/31.

“This is terrible,” Loretta Lynch, former president of the California Public Utilities Commission and an energy-policy expert, told me…(more)

What exactly does Newsom owe PG&E officials that makes him so intent on pushing their profits to the top of his list of state concerns? This kind of allegiance is not excusable in a public servant and should make if ineligible to run for national office. Once again, California is called upon to warn the nation that they don’t want our public servants in their White House. Will they listen this time or just gaze at the well-coiffed attractive man that is somehow indebted to big energy.

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