News

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Hearing shows huge disconnect between lofty goals and the ability of the city to implement them.

The outcome was pretty much determined in advance. The San Francisco Housing Element is, as Fred Sherburn Zimmer, director of the Housing Rights Committee put it, “state blackmail, and you all know this.”

So the Land Use and Transportation Committee sent this plan to the full Board of Supes, where it will be approved Tuesday/24.

But in the process, we learned that the Planning Department, which had to develop the Housing Element and its ambitious affordable housing goals, and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, which would implement those goals, are on very different tracks…(more)

Engardio report on nextdoor on what he found when he met with Taraval Police : nextdoor – excerpt

I learned a lot listening to police officers express their concerns about the difficulties and challenges of doing effective police work in San Francisco. I spent 10 hours talking to beat officers one-on-one and in groups at the Taraval police station serving the Sunset and much of the westside.

Police officers in San Francisco are stretched thin. They’re a model of police reform but treated like they can’t be trusted. They’re constantly under fire while being asked to do too much without the tools they need. They don’t feel valued or supported. Many are leaving.

We’re short 500 officers (and growing) for a city our size. This is not sustainable. Taraval station had 130 officers three years ago. Now, there are only 65. That means only 4 or 5 officers on a given shift to serve a population of 130,000 over 10 square miles.

With so few officers in such a large territory, they’re constantly crisscrossing the entire westside from hot call to hot call with no time to do the community policing they prefer to do and residents deserve.

Officers say they want to do proactive police work to solve and prevent crime but they lack tools and technology that other Bay Area cities provide. Well-meaning but overly restrictive policies in SF make it difficult to help crime victims when common sense should prevail.

It’s a dangerous job. Thieves stealing catalytic converters at 4am a couple nights ago on the westside opened fire on officers who tried to arrest them. Our officers are getting shot at by organized criminals over a car part.

The officers I spoke to were diverse and committed to serving residents despite the difficulties. Nearly 60 percent of our officers are people of color. We must change the narrative about police in San Francisco. They are essential. And they need to know they are valued and supported…

(more) this link only worked is you have a nextdoor account.

By Margaret Hetherwick : sfexaminer – excerpt (includes audio and graphics)

San Francisco’s Native American community has been waiting on a planned housing development for years — and now, thanks to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, it’s on its way.

One of Pelosi’s last acts as speaker was securing $750,000 for a cutting-edge, six-story housing development in the Mission District of San Francisco called “The Village SF.”

The project is the brainchild of Friendship House, a nonprofit for Native Americans living in urban areas. It will be constructed right across the street from the Friendship House office on Julian Ave, near the 16th Street BART station and is set to break ground this year and be completed by 2025…(more)

by Will Jarrett and Eleni Balakrishnan : missionlocal – excerpt (include auto track)

Politicians and advocates today rallied at City Hall ahead of a vote that – if approved tonight – will prevent the police from pulling people over for certain kinds of traffic violations…

San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju said that banning pretext stops would not only reduce racial discrimination in stops, but could make the city safer.

“Right now,” said Raju, “you end up with police spending their time on stops and searches that the data shows are not leading to something.” By eliminating these stops, he said, they could dedicate more time to dangerous violations such as running through red lights.

What is the policy exactly?

A version of this policy has been on the table since last summer. In its first iteration, it proposed that 18 types of stop be banned, but that list has since been chopped down to nine. Should the policy pass, people could no longer be pulled over for these reasons:

1. Failure to properly display or mount license plates when the rear plate is still legible.
2. Failure to display registration tags, or driving with a registration that expired over a year ago.
3. Failure to illuminate license plates.
4. Driving without one tail light, or driving without tail lights during the day.
5. Driving with a missing or broken brake light.
6. Affixing objects to windows or hanging objects from a rearview mirror.
7. Failure to signal while turning or changing lanes.
8. Sleeping in a car.
9. All pedestrian stops, unless there is an immediate danger of a crash.

This newest iteration of the policy brings some substantive changes to the version that was tabled and discussed last month…(more)

No helpful link other than this is the new sfgovtv.org page that should have the link by date.

By Mike Ege :sfstandard – excerpt

Twenty-twenty-two was a challenging year for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

In addition to the usual tug-of-war for power between the board and Mayor London Breed, supervisors had to weather a massive election cycle while addressing exigent problems such as the drug overdose crisis and economic shocks from the Covid pandemic.

While there will be no marathon of elections in 2023, the board will continue to face hurdles in both policy and politics. Here’s a look at the key issues that will shape next year’s board politics, some familiar and some new…(more)

By Josh Koehn : sfstandard – excerpt

San Francisco found itself deeply under water on New Year’s Eve to the surprise of Mayor London Breed and other city officials, who said they were expecting less than an inch of rain.

But a day after parts of the Mission, SoMa and other neighborhoods flooded with several feet of water, Breed flew to Las Vegas to watch the San Francisco 49ers play the Raiders from a private luxury box with rapper E-40. Two days later, Breed blamed the National Weather Service for the city’s failure to adequately prepare for the storm.

E-40, the celebrated Bay Area hip-hop entertainer and entrepreneur, posted an Instagram reel Tuesday that shows Breed with him and others in a midfield luxury box at the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada…(more)

RELATED:

Mayor Breed Claimed SF Wasn’t Warned About Last Week’s Big Storm. The National Weather Service Says Otherwise

What kind of a mayor does San Francisco want?

By kevin Truong :sfstandard – excerpt

Preliminary plans have been filed to transform a portion of the historic Warfield Building in the city’s Mid-Market neighborhood into 34 apartments—in what would be the first office-to-residential conversion since the pandemic.

The plans to transform the building at 988 Market St. were filed by San Francisco developer Group i, which aims to turn around 25,000 square feet in the building into 27 market-rate apartments and seven listed as affordable…(more)

These renovations are not nearly as costly as we were being told they would be. And such and historic property should be well worth preserving. Early results of efforts to up zone this neighborhood with tax breaks brought in the money for a while, but, that goose got cooked and is no longer producing those golden eggs. It remains to seen how many of the corporate tax breaks will fulfill their long term promises too the city and the citizens they displaced.