Transportation

state propositions

From Motorists Association

San Francisco Proposition I

Voters will decide whether to allow private motor vehicles on John F. Kennedy Drive and connector streets (known as the JFK Promenade) except for Sundays and legal holidays plus Saturdays, April through September.

San Francisco Proposition J

In a competing JFK Drive proposition, voters will decide whether to uphold the May 2022 ordinance that provided for the closure of portions of JFK Drive and some connector streets in Golden Gate Park to use as open recreation areas.

San Francisco (City and County) Proposition L

Voters will decide whether to raise $2.6 billion ($100 million annually) through the renewal of a one-half cent sale tax through 2053 for transit maintenance/improvements (41.2%); major transit projects (22.6%); streets and freeways (18.9%); paratransit services (11.4%); system development and management (5.9%). A two-thirds majority of voters would need to approve the extension.

Housing

Torrance leaves League of California Cities, says groups failing to meet goals – Daily Breeze

By Irene Garcia : localtoday – excerpt

Torrance City Council voted unanimously this week to leave the League of California Cities, saying the organization is failing in its mission to expand and protect local control for cities.

The motion, proposed by Councilor Mike Griffiths, was prompted by the dismissal of a Cal Cities petition in support of a ballot measure to strengthen the local planning authority. Griffiths said his frustration had been building for several years and called the organization’s lobbying lackluster.

Cal Cities officials said they disagreed with the council’s assessment; The organization, they said, fights hard for local control over land use and zoning, and urged Torrance to remain a member.

“One of my top priorities as President of Cal Cities is maintaining local control, and I cannot do this alone. I need your help, I need your participation,” President Ali Taj said. “Torrance is an integral member of Cal Cities and serves as a key voice in the South Bay. Our fight is not over yet.”

Regarding the dismissal of the ballot measure, Cal Cities regional public affairs manager Jeff Kiernan said several Cal Cities committees were looking closely at them but had concerns about their language… (more)

Housing

California Homeless Population Grew by 22,000 Over Pandemic

by Manuela Tobias at CalMatters : sfstandard – excerpt

The first statewide snapshot of California’s homelessness crisis since the pandemic hit reveals that the number of people without a stable place to call home increased by at least 22,500 over the past three years, to 173,800.

That’s based on a CalMatters analysis of the federal government’s point-in-time count, a biennial headcount of people sleeping on the streets and in shelters tallied by California cities and counties earlier this year for the first time since 2019.

Homelessness experts mostly attribute the rise to precipitous drops in earnings during the pandemic among Californians already teetering on the edge. They also point to a worsening housing affordability crisis that is decades in the making.

“We have to solve this rotting core in the center of California, which is that we are a million units short of housing for extremely low-income workers,” said Margot Kushel, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative…(more)

Politics

Grassroots Democrats denounce PAC that helped get Haney elected to Assembly

By Tim Redmond :48hills – excerpt

Govern for California is anti-labor, anti-teacher, anti-single-payer, and pro-Matt Haney. Now county committees around the state are telling Democrats not to take the money.
Several county chapters of the California Democratic Party have passed or are considering resolutions condemning the anti-labor plutocratic group Govern for California and calling on Democratic candidates to refuse to accept the group’s money.

The SF County Central Committee approved that resolution Sept. 28, with Sen. Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Phil Ting the only ones voting no…

The resolution has no binding authority, but it’s part of a growing movement among grassroots Democrats to distance the party from a powerful group of very rich donors who are under investigation for dubious campaign spending and openly seeking to end tenure for teachers, end organized labor in government, and block single-payer health care.

Haney insisted he supported single-payer, but he took $285,000 in direct contributions from Govern for California affiliates. Check out this video where David Crane, the co-founder of the group, explains how he helped kill single-payer:..(more)

Sounds like a lobbying organization if they are working on that many subjects. David Crane must be a lobbyist if he killed the California single payer bill.

Housing

SF’s Downtown Condos Are Piling Up And Pricing Down As Housing Market Cools

By Kevin Truong : sfstandard – excerpt

High-rise condos near San Francisco’s downtown—which account for the bulk of San Francisco’s newer housing stock—are piling up amid rising interest rates and a shift in the city’s housing market.

The luxury condos are another casualty of San Francisco’s slow return to offices, with a once-thriving social and retail scene in SoMa and Mission Bay now gasping for air. Home buyers are looking to other neighborhoods for less cookie-cutter units, more outdoor space and—frankly—more life… (more)

deregulated housing bills, Housing

Marc Benioff Calls To ‘Restructure’ SF Downtown, Adding More Housing

By Kevin Truong : sfstandard – excerpt

The walk up to the Moscone Center on Day 1 of Dreamforce had a sentimental air, with winding registration lines of techies in Allbirds or t-shirts advertising their favorite enterprise software under Patagonia vests…

The 20th iteration of Dreamforce tried to create a feeling of a return, underscored by the keynote presentation theme of “The Great Reunion” delivered by Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor. As usual, Benioff played a starring role in the day’s events and used the stage to tout his commitments to the city and its recovery.

“This needs to go well so we attract more business back to San Francisco. This will be a key way of reopening downtown, reopening these areas and giving everybody a big boost,” Benioff said in an interview. “We invested a lot in Moscone, and this is the first time Moscone’s really being used. Everything is open for the first time so let’s see if this can be a great convention city.”…

Benioff said that as he traveled the country and observed the economic recovery in major business centers, San Francisco’s downtown stood out for its overwhelming reliance on office space…

“If you go to a city like Philadelphia it looks like it’s a lot more open. Why is that? Because you have office, residential, university, arts, all these things mixed in the downtown,” Benioff said, calling for “a lot more housing” in San Francisco’s downtown. “You have to rebalance, restructure, refill your downtown if you want it to feel alive.”…

And return-to-office mandates are not on the horizon: Benioff said recently at an event in New York City that “office mandates are never going to work” …(more)

RELATED

Benioff Speaks  about a number of subjects during Dreamforce week.

Being as he is one of the only tech titans standing who holds much sway in San Francisco since the out of office exit turned the downtown into a deserted nightmare of streets and sidewalks with a threat on every corner, he is one of the few people who may be able to knock some sense into City Hall. We will share a few pearls of wisdom that he handed out from a number of media sources.

““There’s no finish line when it comes to security and social engineering,” He was commenting on Uber hack and the social engineering is puzzling but, perhaps it lack context.

“Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on quiet quitting: Do what makes you happy”

Benioff Says San Francisco homelessness is improving as City’s performance scorecard shows 3.5% decline. He backed Prop C to fund homeless projects by taxing gross receipts on corporate revenue above $50 million.

The market ‘doesn’t fully appreciate how committed we are to growth and margins’, which means acquisitions of other tech companies are on the horizon.

Marc is inspired by Patagonia founder’s giving away his company. will he do something similar?

 

 

Housing

Another Housing Denial: Concerns Over Apartment Size Kill 57 Units on Parking Lot

By Sarah Wright : sfstandard – excerpt

San Francisco is back at it with housing denials, this time killing 57 units planned for a 15-spot parking lot in the city’s South of Market district.

A conditional use authorization for the 1010 Mission St. project was denied at the Planning Commission last week in response to concerns from local community groups, who argued that the units were too small and that too few of them, at 13, would be considered “affordable” with even fewer set aside for the lowest-income people in the city…

“I believe the opposition of this project is really representative to what seems to be a trend of market-rate micro-unit housing being proposed in dense neighborhoods like SOMA,” said Commissioner Gabriella Ruiz, who voted against the project’s zoning approval.

PJ Eugenio, an employment counselor from the South of Market Community Action Network, was one in a deluge of speakers who attended Thursday’s meeting to oppose the project. He and others argued that SOMA already has too many single-room occupancy units that aren’t affordable, saying it’s “out of touch with the community.”…(more)

No one can claim the opposition is fighting housing when there is proof that a lot of the tiny units are empty because no one wants to live in them. Even homeless people and lower income people have standards and the new closets do not meet their needs. It is time to tackle the affordability problem and handing out entitlements does not solve that problem or satisfy the RHNA quotas. We just learned the thousands of entitled unbuilt properties in the pipeline do not count. Neither do the thousands of empty unfilled units. Once people see the goals behind the RHNA numbers are unobtainable, there is widespread interest in joining the fight against them. Find out more about the RHNA wars September 21, 2022, 6:30PM on the Zoom Town Hall: https://catalystsca.org/ where some city leaders will explain why they are joining the lawsuit.

Politics

Nearly Half of San Franciscans Have Been Victims of Theft, New Poll Says

By Garrett Leahy : sfstandard – excerpt

Nearly half of San Franciscans have been a victim of theft in the past five years and a quarter have been threatened or physically attacked, according to a new poll.

Findings from the SF Chronicle survey underscored the challenges of the city and the unhappiness of its residents, with 65% saying life in SF is worse today than when they moved here.

The survey also found that 39% of residents have had their property damaged in the past five years…(more)

Housing

New law represents ‘seismic shift’ in California housing policy

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)

Uncategorized

The state’s local housing goals are nothing more than a farce

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?