SF politics

SF politics

Despite some idealistic intentions, that framework is in fact what put Muni in the financial hole in the first place. Working from a scarcity mindset, namely trying to preserve an already pilfered service, is a losing battle. To guarantee the service that citizens and workers expect from a city like San Francisco requires a committed vision of the future, one that centers Muni as the public good that it is.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by SFMTA (@sfmta_muni) San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie only stepped in to help with negotiations during the teachers' strike a week and a half ago, even though they officially began negotiating a new contract almost a year ago, and an impasse was declared in October, leading to a practice strike in November. [Mission Local]

"I am in touch with the Rapid Response Network and community organizations to ensure communities continue to receive accurate information," Lurie said. "We are not aware of any other immigration enforcement action in the city today. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and remain committed to upholding the values and laws of our city."

Roughly a month after neighborhood and small business groups sued San Francisco over a housing plan they said went too far, a coalition of housing activists are filing their own suit arguing the city's plan doesn't go far enough. "We are here today on the precipice of St. Valentine's Day out of love: love for the San Franciscans who can't afford where they live, who are forgoing essential items like health care and saving for the future," she said.

After coming off of the high of participating in citywide teacher strikes, a group of around 20 people gathered at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital's courtyard for a different cause. "We're going to get the Zuckerberg off of San Francisco General Hospital," said Sasha Cuttler, a retired nurse and organizer of the event. The effort was simple; get a group of 10 people to replace each letter in Zuckerberg's name with a hand-made construction paper box to spell out "Pretti Good," the last names of two Minnesotans who were shot dead by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.

The Board of Supes Budget and Finance Committee Wednesday sent forward without recommendation a plan to give a private developer $40 million for a hotel project that appears to be a direct violation of the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance. Supporters of the plan, including Mayor Daniel Lurie and Sup. Matt Dorsey, say that turning an old, historic office building on Third Street into a modern hotel would help revitalize downtown.

Mission District street food vendors say new regulations drafted by the Department of Public Health could run them out of business. "Our community is already living with so much uncertainty, costs have risen and our stability is fragile," said Rosi Villanueva, in Spanish. Villanueva was one of two dozen street food vendors who gathered on Tuesday for a rally at the 24th Street BART station.

For 50 years, the non-profit MCCLA at 25th and Mission has run arts programming from the four-story building it leased from the city for a dollar a year. The Arts Commission has also given them funding, with the expectation that they will raise more funds from donors, classes and events. This month, however, the Mission Cultural Center ran out of money and on Jan. 26 it closed indefinitely.

In an attempt to assuage concerns that the proposed four-story building to replace the shuttered Western Plywood warehouse at 2600 Harrison Street in the Mission is incompatible with the "design, scale and mass" of the neighborhood, Kerman Morris Architects has redesigned the project. The new design reduces the street-level wall along Harrison, includes a more open Production, Distribution & Repair (PDR) space, and adds an area with benches and raised planters along the street.

We should reflect on what is working, where we've fallen short, and what's next,

On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered in Golden Gate Park to celebrate the life and legacy of a San Francisco icon. The California Academy of Sciences honored Claude, the beloved albino alligator. Claude was 30 years old and lived at the academy for 17 years until his death last month. Sunday's festivities included a NOLA-style second line parade in a nod to Claude's Louisiana roots, a Claude costume contest for kids and stories shared by the late gator's care team.

Though he was better known before running for his charitable leadership as founder of the poverty-fighting nonprofit Tipping Point, Lurie immediately after getting elected began focusing on crime, homelessness, housing bottlenecks and quality-of-life issues like cleaning the streets. Lurie streamlined housing approvals, re-organized and sped up city safety responses, launched an anti-homelessness campaign and won a 73% approval rating at Thanksgiving among local voters.

I know that people think this happened overnight, but it definitely did not. This is my stuff, and I'm very proud of it.

Too many people in San Francisco are falling into crisis when intervention could and should come sooner. At the center of this effort is a simple reality: Stability is the gateway to recovery. For many people with severe mental illness, medication is what allows treatment to work at all. Without it, housing placements fail, care plans break down, and crises repeat themselvesoften with greater harm each time.

Did the Upper Great Highway closure make Sunset neighborhood streets less safe? Supervisor Alan Wong claimed it did at a January 8 press conference, citing a simple year-over-year map comparison of crash data. But my analysis, using the same DataSF crash data with rigorous statistical controls, finds no evidence to support that claim, and if anything, the data suggest the opposite.

Lurie's upzoning measure, which the Board of Supervisors approved last month and which comes in response to intense state pressure to build tens of thousands of new housing units in the next half-decade, would allow for six- to 10-story buildings on major thoroughfares in multiple parts of the west and north side San Francisco. But opponents fear the measure will lead to mass displacement of existing residents as older buildings are torn down for redevelopment, and will lead to altering the character of their neighborhoods.

In Star Trek: The Original Series, the USS Enterprise never returned to Earth. In The Next Generation, Picard's Enterprise-D visited every once in a while, and when debuted, the basic premise put the crew on the fringes of the Federation. But in a two-part thriller that aired 30 years ago, on January 1 and January 8, 1996, Deep Space Nine took a trip back to idealistic 24th-century Earth, where even paradise could turn into a snakepit.