Category: Update

By Mike Ege : sfstandard – excerpt

This week, the Board of Supervisors has a return engagement with two controversial housing bills, and is set to clear financing for three importantaffordable housing projects. They will also likely vote to expand a funding scheme for further promoting tourism, and declare certification of theJune 7 election results. (As always, wonks looking for the full kit and caboodle can check out the complete agenda.)

Housing Bills: Will Gridlock Continue?

The Board is set to again consider two bills on housing that caused considerable headaches for housing advocates: one, to legalize more dwelling units in single-family neighborhoods, and another to stop development of certain “micro-unit” housing projects. The two bills have been paired together as part of a compromise, but at the board’s June 14 meeting, District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman asked that the bills be continued due to advice from the City Attorney.

The Mandelman bill, originally drafted to allow some fourplexes and other multi-unit buildings in districts zoned for single-family homes, was received with some optimism from housing advocates. But it was plunged into development hell at the board’s Land Use and Transportation Committee, who tacked on several caveats…

The companion bill, sponsored by District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin, bans “micro-unit” efficiency studio housing in the Tenderloin and Chinatown, with the intention of preventing the gentrification of those neighborhoods’ existing stock of single room occupancy hotels…(more)

They might as well quit building micro units since most are empty due to the lack of takers.

https://chargefinder.com/us/charging-station-san-francisco-ccsf-sfmta/dnmrgz

It appears that the majority of public EV chargers were all planned for the now empty downtown office buildings and hotels and for some reason there are a lot of them around North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf.

Another mistaken assumption by our city planners that the office workers would drive EVs and the rest of us would not. What do you want to bet that the EV chargers are not cheap. Perhaps they would like to move them to less dense neighborhoods where car owners live and now work in larger numbers.

By Mike Ege : sfstandard – excerpt

It’s a rare election in San Francisco that doesn’t feature some form of measure on the ballot, and some of the policy questions they pose might have you asking how they wound up going to voters in the first place…

This year—with four elections scheduled—has been especially busy.

So far, San Francisco has voted on 11 ballot questions, including four recalls. Our final election of the year, on Nov. 8, will probably also feature a full slate of measures. To date, the Board of Supervisors is mulling 10 more charter amendments for the fall election. Meanwhile, more measures—including a plan to undo car closures in Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway—are in the works.

So, how do these questions come before the electorate?

Ballot measures can land on the ballot in multiple ways, from signature-gathering to the legislative process. Here’s a breakdown of the different kinds of ballot measures and how exactly they happen…(more)

Thanks to the author for taking this on. We need a refresher course every now and then since the laws on these procedures have been known to change.

By Adam Shanks : sfexaminer – excerpt

The struggle over homeless services in The Haight will continue.

A new law will require The City to locate 20 units of temporary housing for young adults facing homelessness in the neighborhood — but it seems unlikely to ever actually happen.

Mayor London Breed will decline to sign the law, to which the Board of Supervisors gave final approval this month, her office confirmed to The Examiner. Nevertheless, the law will still take effect. It passed with unanimous support from the Board of Supervisors, rendering Breed’s veto power meaningless. Still, her refusal to sign is a signal she does not support the bill…

The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing reviewed Preston’s legislation in a May report and estimated that it would cost between $5.7 million to $9 million to purchase 20 new units of housing. The cost of actually operating a 20-bed shelter was estimated to be between $715,000 to $860,000 per year.

The City has $58.4 million left in its Our City, Our home fund earmarked for transition-age-youth housing, but spending it on shelter — including the transitional shelter stipulated in Preston’s legislation — is not allowed without a tweak to city law, according to HSH.

The City’s Real Estate Division looked in the neighborhood and did not find a single appropriate building for sale. Eleven were available for lease, but none of those were an entire building…(more)

By Eleni Balakrishnan : missionlocal – excerpt

After two years of praise and acknowledgement for their strong pandemic response, community organizers are suddenly feeling like the mayor’s new budget has pulled the rug out from under them.

In the midst of a new surge, the mayor’s budget cuts all funding for Covid-19 response work provided by community hubs, which focus on providing testing and vaccines for neighborhoods and communities heavily impacted by the pandemic and in need of resources.

Community leaders who run the centers in neighborhoods like the Mission, Bayview-Hunters Point, and Lakeview-Outer Mission, were surprised in a Zoom call last week to hear that they would lose their funding at the end of the month…(more)

Unbelievable.

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

The plan is going to get a lot of pushback from the supes. So it’s far from a done deal

Mayor London Breed’s proposed budget for the next two years is a massive document, 386 pages of numbers, charts, graphics—and spin. It’s going to take all of us who follow these things a few days at least to sort it all out.

But some essential takeaways are clear.

The budget substantially increases funding for the Police Department, including a move to hire a lot more sworn officers, at a time when some of the supes are following national recommendations to shift work now done by cops in uniform, with guns, to civilian workers…(more)

By Shawn Vestal, The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.:yahoo – excerpt

May 29—One key dynamic of urban homelessness is laid bare in a new book by a pair of Seattle researchers.

When they compared major cities across the country, they found that homelessness was not strongly associated with high levels of poverty in a community.

What it was very strongly correlated with was high levels of wealth.

The authors of this new book, “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” found that many cities with very high levels of poverty — from Detroit to Dallas to Miami to Philadelphia — have relatively low rates of homelessness…(more)

By : sfstandard – excerpt

The upcoming recall election of District Attorney Chesa Boudin presents a fork in the road for San Francisco as two camps of voters envision different paths forward for the city.

On one side, some San Francisco voters report satisfaction with their experience living in the city and remain staunchly faithful to progressive ideologies. On the other, people express fears of crime and dissatisfaction with aspects of city life and point to Boudin’s recall as a stepping stone to solving its many issues…(more)

I appreciated the even-handed approach the media is taking on this and other controversial issues lately. Investigative reporters are digging deep and finding a lot of flaws in the systems at City Hall. We need to fix those systems that perpetuate the problems and that will take new leadership with management skills that seem to be lacking. For the time being we will have to rely on the media to keep digging and exposing what has remained hidden for too long and hope for some new heroes to appear on the horizon with some fresh ideas to pull us out of the morass we are in and end the fighting over lifestyles that is sapping all our energies.

SPUR PLAN:

If anyone wants to see the SPUR plans the video with maps and here.
https://www.spur.org/events/2022-05-24/renewing-san-franciscos-economic-core
See above for links to the program and the maps

Notes taken by Mari on SPUR plans : “Renewing San Francisco’s Economic Core” This will require a new level of collaboration between public and private-sector stakeholders to seize opportunities and overcome extant…

This is pretty much about the City Core, which to them is the downtown area, that they had spread into Northbeach and down into SOMA and a far west as Castro in the minds of the Downtown establishment. Some of their maps indicated little spurts all over the city of active areas pre-COVID.

There was a map that I hope we can find that shows (what I believe they labeled) the tax retrieval base, more or less. Where the new business activity is centered now. there was a small dark area around the Market Embarcadero area and the next big color spread that seemed to indicate activity was on the West Side of he city. I may have misunderstood this so it would be good to see the video and review the report.

It is clear that the primary concern on SPUR is to revive the Market Street corridor where 75% of the sales tax came from office spaces.

The primary objective was described as the need to take these actions to revive the preferred office space area:
Re-articulate the uses of the downtown economic core
Clean and keep safe streets
Deal wth the affordability issues
Re-imagine the downtown community benefit district

Night life and night lights
Painted sidewalks, signage etc.

They like the idea of Friday night monthly events to get people to work and they give them a reason to stay and play in the bars and restaurants by having music and entertainment on the streets.

They see the downtown mixed up with live/work etc. as a long term 30 year solution.
For the short term they want bodies. For that they want to get companies to bring workers in for 3 day work weeks.
They want to get residents in SF to come downtown as well.
They like the idea of pop-ups in spaces to activate the ground floors and fill them with art and culture.

Of course this means taking people away from their neighborhood businesses and could present a challenge to people living in other districts.

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Mayor’s response:
https://sfmayor.org/article/mayor-london-breed-announces-investments-support-small-business-recovery-san-francisco%E2%80%99s