News

By Dr. Kerr : westsideobserver – excerpt

The City’s first Sunshine Ordinance was enacted in 1993. In 1999, 58% of voters approved an amended version. Now enshrined in Section 67 of the Administrative Code it opens spectacularly; “Government’s duty is to serve the public, reaching its decisions in full view of the public…The people do not cede…the right to decide what the people should know about the operations of local government.”

While government officials profess allegiance to transparency, they also resist disclosing information about the inner workings (and failings) of their domains. So, a way to ensure compliance with the Sunshine Ordinance was needed. The Ordinance created a Sunshine Ordinance Task Force (SOTF) to promote public access to government records and meetings, adjudicate related disputes, and advise the Board of Supervisors on improving transparency. It’s comprised of 11 volunteer members, 3 of whom are nominated by the Nor-Cal chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). All SOTF applicants are interviewed and appointed by the Board of Supervisors.

Since its inception, the SOTF has been a thorn in City Hall’s backside. Why? Well, there’s a gap between what citizens and City Hall view as transparency. Engaged citizens and journalists seek more information than officialdom likes to share. Tension and disputes are predictable. When the SOTF has interpreted the Sunshine Ordinance strictly, it has infuriated wayward City officials. Regrettably, such points of friction have previously triggered City Hall to retaliate against the “People’s Court.” Another point of friction is casting sparks.While government officials profess allegiance to transparency, they also resist disclosing information about the inner workings (and failings) of their domains. So, a way to ensure compliance with the Sunshine Ordinance was needed. The Ordinance created a Sunshine Ordinance Task Force (SOTF) to promote public access to government records and meetings, adjudicate related disputes, and advise the Board of Supervisors on improving transparency. It’s comprised of 11 volunteer members, 3 of whom are nominated by the Nor-Cal chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). All SOTF applicants are interviewed and appointed by the Board of Supervisors.

Since its inception, the SOTF has been a thorn in City Hall’s backside. Why? Well, there’s a gap between what citizens and City Hall view as transparency. Engaged citizens and journalists seek more information than officialdom likes to share. Tension and disputes are predictable. When the SOTF has interpreted the Sunshine Ordinance strictly, it has infuriated wayward City officials. Regrettably, such points of friction have previously triggered City Hall to retaliate against the “People’s Court.” Another point of friction is casting sparks…

Herrera’s “Brute Cudgel” Charge – As reported by the Examiner’s Jeff Elder, a showdown between SFPUC chief Dennis Herrera and the SOTF is escalating. On September 7th, the SOTF unanimously reproached Herrera for failing to maintain his official calendar, early in his tenure at the SFPUC. A similar violation occurred in 2020 when he was City Attorney. At the time, Herrera had vowed to fix the problem in exchange for dropping a second complaint. Department heads must keep and disclose informative business calendars per the Sunshine Ordinance. In 2015 the Board of Supervisors even voted to include themselves under the calendar requirement, despite opposition from then-Supervisor London Breed…(more)

By Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center – excerpt

A new model that combines sea-level rise scenarios and information about associated groundwater level responses shows that coastal water tables will rise as groundwater levels are pushed up by landward intrusions of seawater due to sea-level rise.

A new paper, “Increasing threat of coastal groundwater hazards from sea-level rise in California,” published in Nature Climate Change on August 17, 2020, describes a numerical model that estimates the depth of the present-day coastal water table and the future response of these groundwater levels to a range of sea-level rise scenarios for the entire California coast. The new USGS publication uses projected sea-level rise scenarios to assess the potential threat these higher groundwater levels pose for related hazards along the California coastline. Projected sea-level rise and storms could result in coastal flooding causing severe threats to communities, infrastructure, the economy, and natural resources…(more)

livablecalifornie. – excerpt

AB 2053 is Dead – sort of

It failed passage in the Senate Governance and Finance Committee, but could come back this session as a “gut and amend” or next session as an new bill.

We support social housing if it’s done in partnership with cities that want it and with the local jurisdictions having control.

State subsidies would be needed to ensure building for the lower income needs without over-building market-rate. The bureaucracy created to implement it should be limited, using local resources / existing resources whenever possible.

Unfortunately, AB 2053 did not meet our criteria for a good social housing bill. United Neighbors is working with Sen Hertzberg’s staff to amend the bill before it returns. We have provided our suggestions to them, including creating a pilot program, as outlined in our position letter.

AB 2011 passed with promises to reconcile with SB 6

We called AB 2011 the worst bill of the session in a news article. We opposed it in a position letter. We believe residential mixed use of empty or underutilized commercial buildings along commercial corridors are good places to add residential units and we strongly supported SB 15, but that bill does not seem to be moving. SB 6 is another commercial corridor bill.

Senate Governance and Finance Chair, Sen Anna Caballero points out the need to reconcile AB 2011 and SB 6 in hearing AB 2011 in committee June 29, 2022

Here is a comparison of AB 2011 and SB 6 from the latest committee analysis:

By-right vs. allowable use…
Development potential…
Affordability requirements…
Labor standards…
Commercial vacancy…
Sunset…
Going forward…

AB 2011 and SB 6 are likely to need to be reconciled. Such reconciliation could include limiting each bill to separate geographic areas throughout the state, targeting each bill at different types of development (for example, market-rate versus affordable developments), applying one bill more broadly, but with fewer benefits for developers, or others…(more)

By Benjamin Schneider : sfexaminer – excerpt

A new state law would allow developers to convert strip malls and office parks into apartment buildings — in a policy change that could produce far more housing than last year’s high-profile effort to end single-family zoning in California.

AB 2011, authored by Buffy Wicks, an East Bay Assembly member, and passed by the Legislature last week, rezones commercial areas on major boulevards for three-to-six story residential development. And it permits those buildings “by right,” meaning they will not be subject to discretionary reviews from neighbors or lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act. All told, the bill could enable the construction of more than 2 million new homes… (more)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Why is everyone so set on meeting “RHNA” standards when the evidence is very clear that it will never happen?

In March, the Office of the State Auditor released a report on the implementation of the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, the massive planning process that seeks to add 2.5 million housing units to the state over the next eight years.

Most of the major news media in the state ignored the audit, which was pretty scathing: It said, in essence that the Department of Housing and Community Development, which oversees RHNA, bungled the numbers, used projections that aren’t reliable, and left cities and counties hanging without accurate goals and timetables.

People who are typically on opposite sides of the housing debate cheered: Yimby law said that audit should that HCD’s projections were too low. The California Association of Local Electeds said the audit proved projections were too high.

Missing from much of the debate and discussion is a problem that a few critics have raised from the start: The RHNA goals are so far-fetched that cities and counties can’t possible meet them—and that’s not entirely, or even primarily, the fault of local government… (more)

How many times do we have to say it? Cities don’t build housing. For a deep div into Bill Barns tapes go to the Catalyst site where you may download it copies of all their Town Halls and register for more. catalystsca.org/

Given the lack of honesty and truth about the reasons for the loss of affordable housing, our Sacramento politicians are trying to shift the blame for their failures to “fix” the homeless problem to local governments. How likely is this to work when we have rolling blackouts and water shortages, epic wildfire, and have become a global joke?

By Bob Silvestri marinpost – excerpt

We need to empower the bottom, not the top.

Incremental changes can lead to big things.

“There are many other common sense solutions that reasonable people concerned just with implementing good policy would be able to agree on. But we’re not doing any of that.” ~State Assembly Member, Kevin Kiley, speaking before the Assembly Housing Community Development Committee in June of 2021

The Consequences of Public Policy Mistakes

Perhaps, the greatest mistake the federal government ever made was raising interest rates after the 1929 stock market crash to teach ‘speculators’ a lesson. This played a significant role in worsening the Great Depression that followed.

The second greatest mistake the government ever made was to bail out the big banks and their wealthy collaborators (the “top”) after the crash of 2008, in the belief that wealth and economic health would “trickle down” to the masses, instead of sending aid directly to the millions of Americans who were losing their jobs and their homes (the “bottom”).[1] That precipitated the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression. So slow that the average family has yet to catch up in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

The 2020 once-in-a-100-year pandemic left the government no choice but to send subsidies directly to the “bottom.” If we factor out the impacts of economic lock-downs, supply-chain disruptions, and the war in Ukraine that fueled global inflation helping the bottom instead of the top has worked pretty well to keep our economy running.

In the depths of 2020, traditional thinking was not an option. I would argue that our affordability crisis is another circumstance that requires challenging the status quo. But Sacramento is stuck in the 2008 belief system and remains stridently committed to “top-down” schemes to stimulate growth and housing affordability.

The truth is that neither our economy nor housing affordability depends on the health of the big banks or big housing developers. Throughout history, beginning with the rise of the merchant class that sparked the Renaissance, socioeconomic success has depended on the health of the working middle class. Trickle-down economics is a con.

California has failed to produce a significant amount of affordable housing because the state continues to pursue a “tax and spend, “demand and punish” approach and refuses to accept that its ideologically-driven policies are misaligned if not completely divorced from the realities of our markets.

Picking up, then, from where Part I of this series left off and putting aside the fact that “housing affordability” is really just a symptom of our society’s “overall unaffordability,” before we discuss new ideas we need to examine some of the facts, challenges, and misconceptions surrounding affordable housing development…(more)

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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)