News

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

The Board of Supes will consider a long-debated plan allowing the police to use military-style weapons—and in the latest version, the cops want to allow robots to shoot people.

Sup. Aaron Peskin has been working for months on developing a policy on police use of special military-style weapons, and it seemed a couple of weeks ago as if everyone was close to a deal.

But the latest red-line version of the proposal, with the SFPD’s proposed changes, includes a couple of stunning additions, including the ability of police robots to use lethal force “when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD.”

This has created a bit of a media fuss since MissionLocal reported it…(more)

By Ethan Kassel : sfstandard – excerpt

Though lights at St. Ignatius’ J.B. Murphy Field have brought nighttime football to the school’s Sunset District campus this season, the legal battles with neighbors aren’t over yet.

The SI Neighborhood Association sent out a press release Monday afternoon, claiming victory in a yearslong battle to have the lights looked into for their environmental impacts on the neighborhood.

The California State Appellate Court sided with neighbors, who claimed that the lights were not exempt from review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Both the school and the San Francisco Planning Commission had claimed the opposite. The San Francisco Superior Court previously sided with the school and Planning Commission.

The court has ruled that the lights’ lasting impacts on the neighborhood must be analyzed under CEQA regulations, which could result in new measures to reduce the lights’ impact.

The court also said that since the 90-foot-tall lights are significantly higher than other structures in the surrounding neighborhood, they cannot be classed as small structures with no impact…(more)

By Joe Eskenazi : missionlocal – excerpt

Every so often, San Francisco hands a flawless script to the nation’s right-wing blowhards and fulminating keyboard warriors, pins a “kick me” sign to its posterior and assumes the position. We can’t help it.

And you know what? It does a damn fine job of that. We can’t help it…

The latest flawless San Francisco script came neatly delivered on Nov. 21, when news broke that the city’s Election Commission had declined to preemptively re-up long-serving elections director John Arntz and instead moved to open up a competitive process for the job that he was invited to participate in….

Commissioner Cynthia Dai also told Mission Local that this decision was not performance-based, and conceded that San Francisco has run free and fair elections (and lots of them) for 20 years. Rather, she said it was time to open up the election director position to a more diverse field; San Francisco, she continued, could not make progress on its diversity goals without opening up top positions.

And Commissioner Robin Stone praised Arntz to the heavens in a memo she wrote him, but confirmed that her decision to not preemptively renew his term and open up a competitive process for his job “reflects a continued commitment to advance institutional DEIBJ” — that is, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging and Justice.…(more)

Seriously, what do you expect from the Elections Commission that just re-aligned the city districts to shift the power in such an obvious manner that no one is going to forget it anytime soon. If you took part in the farce you will never forget the way those commissioners that are now throwing out a seasoned professional our for a novice behaved.

No one seriously believes that the country or the world looks kindly at the San Francisco we now live in. If we started to perform on some level of competence someone would throw a wrench into the works to wreck it while the powers that be stand idly by, engrossed in choosing the next color for Muni bus stops, or the next statue to remove or the next street to rename. All more important than running a functioning city.

by Annika Hom : missionlocal – excerpt

Between three sites, hundreds of affordable housing comes to the Mission

Welcome to Mission Moves! This originally reported roundup reports on newsy Mission moves and happenings. Send tips and curious questions to annika.hom.

Hi friends,

I’ve been out sick, but lately there’s been a lot to talk about! Like, literally… a parking lot. And the 16th St. Mission BART Station site. And the Muni bus yard. Together, these proposed plans could account to over 1,100 units of housing, and much for seniors and families. But I know — you were hooked at “parking lot,” right? Who wouldn’t be? So, let’s get this show on the road!…

More waiting for the Marvel in the Mission…And what about that Muni Yard development?…From Sears to seniors…(more)

These are some of the affordable housing projects planned for the Mission, but we don’t know how many of them may be counted toward the State’s RHANA goals. The Board of supervisors and Planning Department are being pressured into up-zoning by the state.

For more details on this subject and to better understand how your state representatives are representing/mis-representing your interests, you may want to review of of the details of the Housing Element here: https://www.discoveryink.net/?page_id=949

Notes on the supervisors’ comments : Supes on Housing Element

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Gerrymandering and fear-mongering on crime gives the mayor two allies.

Sup. Gordon Mar conceded defeat today, ending the last unresolved race from the November 8 election and signaling a shift in the balance of power on the Board of Supes.

Thanks to Assemblymember Matt Haney’s personal ambition and Mayor London Breed’s successful gerrymandering, two progressive districts, 4 and 6, are now in the hands of far-more conservative supes.

That means the progressives now have at best a shaky 6-5 of 7-4 majority, not enough to overturn a mayoral veto…

Engardio also supports market solutions to the housing crisis, and will join Sups. Matt Dorsey and Catherine Stefani (and, generally, Ashsa Safai) as advocates for allowing more market-rate housing development.…(more)

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)