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Building Department director tasked with reforming antiquated permitting process quits abruptly

By Joe Eskenazi : 48hills – excerpt

In a blow for those hoping to streamline, modernize and cleanse the Department of Building Inspection’s byzantine and hidebound permitting process, the director hired to oversee this move has abruptly resigned after just 2.5 months on the job.

Issam Shahrouri was hired in late 2020 from Oakland, where he was deputy director of its building department. His status as an outsider in a department renowned for its insularity was a source of pride and hope for reformers, who looked to move the Department of Building Inspection past its reputation for scleroticism and corruption. Shahrouri also came to San Francisco in good estimation, and was accredited as a “Certified Building Official” — purportedly making him the only “CBO” in the department after the hasty March 2020 departure of former director Tom Hui in the wake of a corruption investigation.

But department employees were on Tuesday stunned to receive a brief email from interim director Patrick O’Riordan announcing Shahrouri’s sudden departure…(more)

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Supes call for investigation of Ferris Wheel money

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Revenue goes not to the city, but to a private entity that’s part of an FBI corruption probe…

The reason the Recreation and Parks Department wants to extend the run of the Ferris Wheel – according to Rec-Park documents – is that the St. Louis-based vendor that built it, SkyStar Partners, needs about 500,000 rides to make the roughly $9 million it was counting on.

And the private San Francisco Parks Alliance, which is a part of the FBI corruption investigation in SF, was counting on taking its share of about $500,000.

You can read the contract here. Not a penny of the revenue from this carnival ride will go to the city. It’s split between SkyStar and the Parks Alliance, which is supposed to use it to finance celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Golden Gate Park…(more)

Nobody likes to pay for parties more than Rec and Park and the Parks Alliance according to FBI investigations, and the City Attorney.

We were objecting to the fumes and noise from the generator that does not follow the logic for a city that is making ordinary citizens give up their gas generated heating systems and cooks give up their gas stoves. But, if there is also a question of funds and who gets them, it should be up to the Board of Supervisors to determine whether or not to sign the contract. That is, unless the Rec and Park Department have full authority to override City Hall on the matter.

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Governor Newsom’s Latest Executive Overreach – a “Housing Accountability Unit”

By Livable California :

Governor Newsom recently included a new Housing Accountability Unit (HAU) in his proposed budget. Livable California opposes this as major executive over-reach threatening the balance of power between the executive branch, the legislative branch, and local governments.

The governor said: ““Let me just make this clear to all my friends,” Newsom said, “this is to monitor city council meetings. This is to monitor board of supervisors meetings, planning commission meetings. We’re not going to wait for an article to be written to be proactive in terms of holding local government accountable to increasing housing production.”

Livable California strongly supports local government and the close participation of communities at that level. We believe that having an state executive “policeman” in our local meetings will have a chilling effect on communities’ dialogue with their local elected officials…(more)

Consider signing the opposition letter on the site or write your own.

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California Cities Rethink the Single-Family Neighborhood

By Erin Baldassari :kqed – excerpt

More than a century ago, Berkeley pioneered rules prohibiting affordable, multifamily housing from certain areas, and with it, created a new class of neighborhoods reserved exclusively for single-family homes.

Now it’s one of a handful of cities in the country, and the latest in California, to challenge those rules as it seeks to tackle its housing affordability crisis and address decades of racial segregation in housing.

But housing researchers and advocates for low-income residents warn that just allowing more housing in single-family neighborhoods is no panacea. To achieve truly inclusive communities, they say zoning changes have to be coupled with strong renter protections and increased funding for affordable housing.

Berkeley Vice Mayor Lori Droste introduced the legislation earlier this month to change the city’s zoning rules, and make it easier to build fourplexes throughout the city.

The Sacramento City Council last month unanimously approved a draft plan to allow fourplexes throughout the city, becoming the first city in the state to begin the process of removing barriers to small, multifamily housing in all of its residential neighborhoods. Officials in San Francisco and San Jose are considering their own proposals…

But it could soon be a policy that touches the entire state. Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, introduced a bill last year to allow up to two duplexes in most single-family neighborhoods. It passed both houses of the Legislature, but literally ran out of time before getting the final vote it needed to head to the governor’s desk. It’s back this year as Senate Bill 9…(more)

Rumor has it that the State Senate, lead by Atkins and Wiener, have suspended the constitution to get their draconian housing bills passed after failing last year. They cut the time the public has to respond to the bills, not that they listen the pubic anyway.

Taking advantage of the pandemic to declare an emergency and suspend the constitutional rights of citizens to weigh in on the future of housing in the state may not sit well with citizens live in single family homes. This action will almost certainly be challenged in the courts.

The racial argument will fall on deaf ears for the many people of color who have built equity in their homes for generations.  They ability to pass their home on to their children was cut, and now the Democratic state legislature threatens to take their path of building security by building equity away from them.

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70 Hotels Could House the Homeless, if San Francisco Buys

by : sfpublicpress – excerpt

Dozens of hotels could be sold to the city to house the homeless, advocates say. The recently renovated Minna Hotel in SoMa, with 72 rooms, is one of them.

More than 70 hotel owners have indicated they are willing to sell their properties to San Francisco, and now is the perfect time to buy some of them, homelessness activists said Wednesday.

News broke this month that San Francisco would receive a full reimbursement for its shelter-in-place hotels from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, dating back to January 2020. Previously, FEMA funded 75% of the costs. The city has requested $84.4 million in reimbursements from FEMA for 2020, the controller’s office said in an email.

Applying FEMA reimbursements toward hotel purchases offers a relatively quick and simple way to expand San Francisco’s stock of permanent supportive housing, advocates say… (more)

 

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Hundreds of SF Renters Threatened With Eviction During Pandemic (SF Public Press)

by Nina Sparling : publicpress – excerpt

Keeshemah Johnson rushed her partner to the emergency room last summer. Maurice Austin had lost his appetite and wasn’t getting out of bed much. Then he started struggling to breathe. He tested positive for COVID-19 in the ER.

Austin died on Aug. 1, less than a week after Johnson took him to the hospital.

Within days, Johnson said, their landlord began pressuring her to leave. On Sept. 15, she received an eviction notice, stating that she had five days to move out of their Hunters Point apartment. The couple had never added Johnson’s name to the lease — a fact the property owner cited to claim that Johnson and her stepson were illegally squatting in the home they shared with Austin.

“He wasn’t even in the ground yet before they were expecting us to vacate the apartment,” Johnson said.

Johnson is among hundreds of San Francisco renters whose landlords have tried to force them from their homes in the midst of a global pandemic. A San Francisco Public Press analysis of the city’s Rent Board data found that from March 1 through Dec. 31, 2019, landlords filed 1,226 eviction notices; during the same period in 2020, landlords filed 535 notices, even as city, state and federal moratoriums on pandemic-related evictions remain in effect… (more)

What happens when the landlord is a non-profit housing management contractor that works with the city? Is the next strep a complaint to a whistleblower program, call the rent board, or look for a pro bono attorney?

 

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SF Police Commission rejects police budget and layoffs. Will it matter?

By Julian Mark : missionlocal – excerpt

The San Francisco Police Commission on Wednesday night unanimously rejected the police department’s budget proposal, which would lay off 167 police officers, cut technology to aid reform efforts, and reduce the department’s overtime funds.

But the commission’s vote against moving the budget forward was a largely symbolic action that will signal to Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors that the commission was unhappy with the proposal as currently drafted.

In other words, the mayor and the supes will receive the budget no matter what — with a somewhat negative recommendation from the commissioners.

It seemed everyone agreed that such dramatic reductions to the police budget were unacceptable and at least needed deeper consideration. In urging the Police Commission to reject the budget, Chief Bill Scott repeatedly called the cuts “devastating.” …(more)

Did we just hear that  a police chief complained when a citizen took a dangerous situation  in hand by firing a handgun at an intruder? This is not going to end well.

 

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SPUR, Yimbys say stealth state laws can force more housing

By Zelda Bronstein : 48hills – excerpt

But what happens if developers don’t want to build anything but luxury condos — and maybe not even those?

On Friday, February 12, SPUR hosted a webinar entitled “Can Cities Use State Law to Overcome Housing Resistance?” The four panelists, all of the Yimby/Wiener persuasion, answered that question with a resounding Yes.

To anyone who’s depended on the mainstream media for an understanding of the current battle over California housing policy, that response must to be mind-boggling. The establishment press has claimed ad nauseam that the state has done little if anything to address California’s housing crisis.

Reporters have repeatedly memorialized the defeats of state Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 827 (d. 2018) and SB 50 (d. 2019 and again in 2020) and the midnight-hour death of Assemblymember Toni Atkins’ SB 1120 in 2020, leaving the impression that these were the only housing bills or at least the only ones that mattered.

At Friday’s forum, the panelists told a different story. Since 2017, the state Legislature has enacted a slew of housing laws that, as former director of the Department of Housing and Community Development Ben Metcalf put it, “buil[t] out the power of the state” to overrule local land-use authority…(more)

The developer bills that force density on single family homes may be the governor’s downfall, as more people learn about his efforts to overthrow local jurisdiction and remove single family zoning all over he state. All it will take is a candidate who listens to what the voters want and, hopefully knows how to make it happen. Governor Newsom is really pushing his luck. He intends to included a new Housing Accountability Unit (HAU) in his proposed budget, to fund enforcement of the forced density bills.
See details on the bill and actions you may take to fight back. https://www.livablecalifornia.org/governor-newsoms-latest-executive-overreach-a-housing-accountability-unit-in-hcd/

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Supes move to open more hotel rooms for homeless

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Legislation could set up another confrontation with Mayor Breed, who wants to wind down the hotel program.

Now that the Biden Administration has agreed to pay for it, five supervisors are moving to expand the city’s shelter-in-place hotel system to get and keep homeless people off the streets.

The bill would mandate that the city keep 2,200 hotel rooms open, and allow people still living on the streets to move in as current residents exit to other forms of housing…(more)

Someone needs to figure out a way to deal with the system that determines eligibility for rental assistance that people who need a little support to pay their rent we would have less people “falling through the cracks” ending up on the street. Next we need to investigate the unaffordable “affordable” rents that automatically increase, while market rate unit prices are falling. The subject was recently covered by CBS news: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/02/08/some-san-francisco-affordable-housing-units-renting-for-more-than-market-rate-units/

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California Utilities Will Buy More Energy, Hike Rates to Avoid Blackouts: CPUC

By Olga R. Rodriguez  : nbcbayarea – excerpt (video)

Utilities will be allowed to buy extra energy and pass on the costs to customers in order to avoid a repeat of rolling blackouts that kicked in last summer when demand outpaced supply, California regulators said Thursday.

The California Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously to authorize Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Company to purchase additional power in the next three months.

“Customers deserve a reliable grid, and they deserve a regulatory body that will be mobilized to do everything in its power to ensure that we have one,” commission President Marybel Batjer said…(more)

All the more reason for people to switch to solar power, but, will the CPUC make that more difficult? Find out what California does for and against solar power users how the utilities exert constant pressure on net metering. https://solarrights.org

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