Category: Update

By Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez : kqed – excerpt

As Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin mulls a run for mayor, how people view his opposition to market-rate housing would be both a strength and a vulnerability should he jump in the race.

That’s particularly true in San Francisco’s west side, a neighborhood replete with single-family homes where people have rallied against state laws that would allow more multi-story housing to be built. Peskin is sometimes viewed as a champion of saving neighborhood character from what residents consider to be outsize new construction.)

George Wooding, a neighborhood activist who lives just west of Twin Peaks, said neighbors are angry about Mayor London Breed’s “Housing for All Plan,” which would incentivize building taller, denser housing. He said they worry there isn’t enough parking or infrastructure to support the plan.

“That’s going to be one of the turning points of the mayor’s race on the west side,” Wooding said. “Anybody with a brain running for mayor is going to start attacking the density programs.”

San Francisco’s next mayor will steer the city’s future approach to housing.

Peskin is on one side of a divide in development philosophy between moderate and progressive Democrats in San Francisco. The moderates want the city to build, build, build to bring housing costs down. Progressives want the city to focus on building affordable housing while fiercely defending tenant protections…

“Government has a role to play. And a progressive mayor, I think, can do so much more to protect and enhance our existing residents and our existing small businesses,” Peskin said…

Eileen Boken, a west side advocate who frequently attends City Hall meetings, said her neighbors were “blindsided” by state Sen. Scott Wiener’s proposal to wrest housing approval control of Ocean Beach away from the California Coastal Commission…(more)

RELATED:

Petition to Oppose SB 951 and Keep our Pacific Coastline Free and Open.
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/no-on-sb-951-keep-california-coastline-open-and-accessible-2

Peskin’s statement says it all..”We don’t have to destroy San Francisco to save it.”

This statement is profound and comes at a pivotal time. One may walk by many up-zoned empty projects lining streets of empty sidewalks fronting sad boarded up storefronts along streets that were “improved” by SFMTA. We have seen enough destruction already. Now it is time to fix the mess we find ourselves in. We need to restore San Francisco’s once safe friendly neighborhoods that we had before the bulldozers arrived. We need to fill all the holes in the streets and quit digging more. We need a respite from the dust and noise.

In may opinion, the candidates do not fall into left/right categories.

By Gabe Greschler :sfstandard – excerpt

In keeping with a campaign promise to nix legislation that blocks housing, San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Thursday that she will veto a bill that tweaked density limits along the city’s Northern Waterfront.

In a letter, Breed wrote that the bill, authored by Board President Aaron Peskin, “passes off anti-housing policy under the guise of historic protection.” The Board of Supervisors approved the legislation in an 8-3 vote on Feb. 27…

The mayor’s veto pushes Peskin’s housing legislation back to the Board of Supervisors, who can override it with eight votes…(more)

What is the point in this? The bill was already passed with eight votes. Now they have to revote on it again to get the 8 votes to override her veto? What is the point? Does she plan to coerce supervisors into changing their votes? What has changed?

By Xueer Lu : missionlocal – excerpt

Supervisor Ahsha Safaí introduced a resolution at the Board of Supervisors today urging the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to address child homelessness by prioritizing families for shelter.

“In a city with almost 48 billionaires, it is unconscionable that we have children living on our streets when we have shelter beds that are vacant,” said Safaí, who wants the homelessness department to give families shelter or hotel vouchers the same day they make contact with city officials. Families who arrive at an access point, where families get referral to shelters and housing, should be allowed to extend their vouchers if there is no alternative housing or shelter, he said.

In addition, the resolution asks the city to create a multilingual public dashboard where families can monitor the shelter waitlist and their own progress in entering permanent housing…(more)

By Kevin V. Nguyen : sfstandard – excerpt
A group of schools are providing a test case in the city’s most troubled neighborhood.

When San Francisco was mired in “doom loop” talk last year, Mayor London Breed and some business leaders began openly calling for college students to save downtown. Young adults, the thinking goes, would populate struggling areas, reinvigorate the economy and help transform downtown from a 9-to-5 office community to a 24/7 arts and culture destination.

Just one block away from the worst drug corner in the city, the University of California College of the Law SF is putting that theory to the test…

The key to getting the Academic Village over the finish line is the concept that it will be shared by multiple universities.

“Had this been only for the law school, we would have met much more skepticism trying to finance this project,” David Seward, chief financial officer of the university, told The Standard. To pay for Academe at 198, UC Law SF secured $364 million in tax-exempt bond financing…(more)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

More than $200 million goes for services city workers could provide much, much cheaper.

San Francisco has 3,747 vacant jobs—and has spent more than $211 million in the past two years filling some of those positions with outside contractors who charge far more than what city workers would earn, a new study shows.

And the vast majority of that money goes to big out-of-town companies—that is, it leaves San Francisco and does nothing to help the local economy…

The study, by analysts with IFPTE Local 21, which represents thousands of city employees, shows that the percentage of the city budget spend on local workers has dropped from 51 percent ten years ago to 46 percent today.

In some departments, like the scandal-plagued Public Works, the drop has been even more dramatic: DPW used to spend 35 percent of its budget on staff, and now it’s 26 percent.

In the meantime, DPW and the Public Utilities Commission have contracts worth more than $150 million on contracts with companies like AECOM, a giant engineering outfit based in Dallas, which paid its CEO $9.5 million last year.

AECOM charges the city far more than it would cost to fill that job with public employees:…(more)

It is not often you can connect two different stories under such a juicy title as this:

“Overpaid city contractors caught in corrupt schemes. Labor cries foul, threatens to strike.”

By Nuala Bishari : sfchronicle – excerpt

On Thursday, the Chronicle released the results of a poll that shed new light on the city’s mayoral race. Incumbent London Breed is lagging. Only 18% of people polled said they’d list her as a first choice, compared to former Mayor Mark Farrell at 20%, Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie at 16% and Supervisor Ahsha Safaí with 8%.

Of course, San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system doesn’t just count first-place votes. Looking at the second-place data, however, things get even worse for Breed. The mayor has fewer second-choice votes than Lurie or Farrell.

It’s still early; polls will likely shift as we get closer to the November election. But with a weak incumbent and her top challengers all representing the more moderate side of city politics, these numbers do raise a question: Could a progressive-leaning candidate jump in the race and win?

History certainly shows it’s possible, given the proclivities of ranked choice…

One potential candidate, however, was mentioned by people I talked to: Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin — a sometimes controversial figure, but one known both for his encyclopedic knowledge of San Francisco’s rules and regulations and his commitment to advocating for Asian American communities.

“There is a growing clamor to get Peskin to run,” Jeffrey Kwong, president of the left-leaning Harvey Milk Democratic Club, told me. “I think he’s one of the few people moderates can come over to. He has his ear to the ground like no one else. There’s a consensus among progressives that he has the policy acumen and administrative ability. He’s someone who’s able to get started on the first day of the job.”

Peskin has said he hasn’t ruled out a run. When I asked him about the Chronicle’s poll, however, he told me his focus is on “better policies.”

“I know we can make this city work for everyone, in every neighborhood. But to make our city safer, to bring everyone in-doors, to create an economy that works for the rest of us is going to take uniting around smarter policies — not dividing around increasingly bitter politics.”

That sounded awfully campaign-ish to me. This isn’t an easy race to jump into, especially with the enormous amount of money already pouring into the top candidates’ coffers. But there’s still time: The deadline to file isn’t until June 11…(more)

Mark Nagel and Lori Brooke : rescuesf – excerpt

San Francisco’s homeless shelters are in crisis. Homeless shelters are supposed to offer people a first step on their journey out of homelessness, but in San Francisco the majority of people leaving homeless shelters are returning to the streets. In 2023, the City might have spent as much as $81 million serving people in homeless shelters who eventually exited shelters for street sleeping. These disastrous results, produced at such enormous cost, are a colossal failure that should shock every resident of San Francisco.

Based on an analysis of previously unreported City data obtained through a Sunshine request, this Comment contains the following findings:…(more)

• San Francisco’s homeless shelters are failing in their primary mission of helping people permanently leave homelessness.
• During 2020-23, 246 shelter guests died in the City’s shelters.
• The City is spending enormous financial resources on shelter guests who return to homelessness.
• The City’s inadequate management practices have allowed this crisis to worsen year after year

This Comment makes the following recommendations:

• The City should conduct a thorough and speedy investigation into the causes of the high rates of shelter exits to homelessness or unknown destinations
• The City should prepare a comprehensive strategy for improving the effectiveness of the shelter system.
• The City should overhaul the reporting on its response to homelessness to make better use of the data it collects….

CONCLUSION

After living with a homelessness crisis for more than forty years, San Francisco needs a plan that will deliver results and end homelessness. The starting point is to have a shelter system that offers people an effective first step to permanently leaving the streets. The shelter system should connect people with the supportive services that they need, such as primary health care, psychiatric care, and drug treatment, as well as pathways to find transitional housing or permanent housing.

While the City is generally aware of these issues, City officials are not acting with sufficient urgency to address the shelter crisis. So long as San Francisco’s homeless shelters fail to bring people inside, thousands of unsheltered people will continue to suffer on the City’s streets, neighborhoods will continue to suffer from poor street conditions, and the City will continue to waste vast financial resources on ineffective programs. The scale of the shelter crisis calls for immediate action to fix the shelter system, now.

Read the entire document here : https://www.rescuesf.org/_files/ugd/fe2840_d265f726a9ef45d5b440a2be3821aca0.pdf

By Joe Eskenazi : Missionlocal – excerpt

Mayor’s candidate-controlled Yes-on-E committee donated to organization urging no vote on mayor’s housing bond

On paper, virtually every last vestige of San Francisco political power supports Proposition A, Mayor London Breed’s $300 million affordable housing bond. Some of the most gregarious BigMoneySF groups are for it, and so is The League of Pissed-Off Voters (which presently has $10,000 in its bank account and has fund-raised a shade over $109,000 since 2015).

Accordingly, both pro-housing devotee Sen. Scott Wiener and slow-growther Calvin Welch showed up at the Proposition A kickoff. You can only imagine that conversation:..

Big-money donors hoping to impress the mayor are clearly intuiting where to put their money — and the bond ain’t it. If they were having trouble figuring this out, mayoral fund-raising emails sent to frequent donors and obtained by Mission Local overtly call for giving to Props. C, E and F, but not Prop. A. Members of the donor class tell us they’re getting calls on C, E and F, but not A. When the mayor speaks at community events, she talks about C, E and F, but not A…

The billionaire-funded Neighbors for a Better San Francisco Advocacy, the biggest of the BigMoneySF groups, has given $110,000 to TakeActionSF, whose “No B.S.” slate mailer urges San Franciscans to vote down the bond. And, jarringly, the mayor’s Yes-on-E campaign — her own candidate-controlled committee — gave $1,000 to TakeActionSF…

The mayor’s committee donated to an outfit urging voters to reject the mayor’s affordable housing bond…(more)

Given the poor condition of the state and local economies and the high cost of living, including soaring fuel and energy costs, voters are less likely to support more government bonds. Funders understand the economy and bond market. They know the high interest rates and difficulty with supply chains will keep production volumes low and costs high. Now may be the time to pick up foreclosures at a steep discount, not finance new developments. This should be easy when owners abandon their properties in lieu of paying taxes. Banks don’t want loses on their books.