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A New Effort In San Francisco Aims To Debate Rent At The Bargaining Table

April 21, 2022 Jack Ross, Capital & Main. , , , ,
San Francisco, California - On April 11, tenant representatives from the Veritas Tenants Association gathered at the mailbox at 150 Larkin St. across the lawn from San Francisco City Hall. They dropped 15 letters to their landlord, Veritas Investments, the largest landlord in San Francisco and the subject of lawsuits alleging tenant harassment, into the mailbox. “We will show what it means to unionize the biggest private landlord in S.F.,” tenant Madelyn McMillian said. “We will be bargaining on a full range of issues affecting our lives.” The letters presented majority approval of tenant associations in 15 Veritas buildings and asked that Veritas formally acknowledge the unions under a new San Francisco “Right to Organize” ordinance, which went into effect April 11.

TANC Organizing Committee On San Francisco’s ‘Right To Organize’

April 4, 2022 It's Going Down. , , ,
In February, San Francisco officials amended administrative code to “require residential landlords to allow tenant organizing activities to occur in common areas of the building; require certain residential landlords to recognize duly-established tenant associations, confer in good faith with said associations, and attend some of their meetings upon request; and provide that a landlord’s failure to allow organizing activities or comply with their obligations as to tenant associations may support a petition for a rent reduction.” They call it the “right to organize.” While the media and some tenant organizations hailed the legislation as an unprecedented expansion of tenant rights, in key ways the legislation limits its nominal goal and solidifies conditions that undermine mass tenant power.

A School Created A Homeless Shelter In The Gym And It Paid Off In The Classroom

March 18, 2022 Gail Cornwall, Hechinger Report. , , , , ,
San Francisco, California - On a Friday evening in the fall of 2019, Maria Flores stood waiting with her “crazy heavy” duffel bag and her teenage son outside the office of a man whose home she cleans. A friend of hers had told him that Flores had been evicted from the apartment she had lived in for 16 years. There, the single mom had paid $700 a month in rent ever since she’d moved in eight-months pregnant. Now, one night at a motel cost as much as $250. “Every single day I was looking for a place to live,” Flores said. He’d offered two air mattresses, keys to his office, and permission to sleep there on weekends. For the better part of a year, Flores, who asked to use only one of her two surnames, lived that way: Back and forth, spend and scrimp.

The Effort To Recall Progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin

December 22, 2021 Marjorie Cohn and Michael Steven Smith, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Chesa Boudin has been serving San Franciscans as their district attorney for nearly two years. He is a leading progressive in what has been called the progressive prosecutors’ movement. Other progressive district attorneys in that small cohort are George Gascon in Los Angeles and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. In Berger v. United States https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/295/78/, the Supreme Court said that the duty of a prosecutor “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” Yet all too many prosecutors are more concerned with winning cases than with doing justice, which includes the protection of constitutional rights. Boudin campaigned by proposing solutions to the disaster of mass incarceration, one of the leading civil rights issues of our time.

Advocates Have Taken Air Pollution Monitoring Into Their Own Hands

December 17, 2021 Elena Shao, Inside Climate News. , , ,
San Francisco - Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin still remembers riding the bus home from elementary school and smelling fresh-baked pastries and bread from the Parisian Bread Factory near Evans Street. She also remembers how quickly that scent would turn to one of sewage and smoke as the bus pulled closer to her home. Dunn-Salahuddin grew up two decades ago in Bayview-Hunters Point, a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of San Francisco, jutting into the bay. It’s under four square miles, just 8.5 percent of San Francisco’s land mass. This relatively small parcel of the city holds a disproportionate concentration of its toxic and polluting sites. For decades, state and local agencies have tried—halfheartedly, advocates say—to monitor and clean up the polluted air in Bayview.

Day Of The Dead Protest In Front Of Nancy Pelosi’s House

November 1, 2021 Leon Kunstenaar, Indybay. , , ,
The coffin they carried was fake, but the "68000" painted on it, the number of deaths suffered in the U.S. this year because of lack of health care, is all too real. In a Day of the Dead protest, protesters gathered in a slight drizzle at San Francisco's Alta Plaza Park and marched to Speaker Nancy Pelosi's house, a few blocks away. The signs they carried declared health care to be a human right and demanded Medicare for All. One, carried by "Red Berets" was an American flag with the year other countries had instituted national health care written on the stripes. "WHAT ABOUT US???" was on the bottom line. One demonstrator wore a black mourning veil over her face. Many carried little heart shaped pins of a black rose, a Victorian symbol of tragic love, danger and death.

Golden Gate Bridge Shutdown For Immigration Reform

October 2, 2021 Deepa Fernandes and Tal Kopan, San Francisco Chronicle. , , ,
As morning broke over San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge on Thursday, northbound traffic was brought to a halt when dozens of undocumented mothers, students and their allies risked arrest to engage in civil disobedience. Just before 7 a.m., protesters exited their cars, carrying banners and calling on Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Traffic piled up in the bridge’s northbound lanes as demonstrators decried the Democrats’ lack of action to pass meaningful immigration reform, stopping morning commuters for about an hour.

San Francisco Tenant Lawyers Anticipate Flood Of Evictions

June 24, 2021 Noah Arroyo, San Francisco Public Press. , , ,
A wave of evictions could wash across the city next month, tenant attorneys say, even as lawmakers scramble to prevent widespread displacement. “I’m afraid that we’re talking about thousands of people,” said Ora Prochovnick, director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative. The statewide moratorium on evictions for unpaid rents that were due during the pandemic ends June 30 — and recent legislation by San Francisco lawmakers will not change that. State officials are working to extend the moratorium but have yet to reach an agreement. Prochovnick is preparing for a cascade that could overwhelm the city’s free legal defense system if state talks fall through and throngs of residents get pushed from their homes.

Youth Descend On Homes Of Feinstein And Pelosi To Demand Climate Corps

June 18, 2021 Nora Mishanec and Sam Whiting, San Francisco Chronicle. , , ,
San Francisco - A group of youth climate activists scattered wildfire ashes on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco porch Monday, a final act of civil disobedience at the end of a 266-mile march meant to spur lawmakers to action on climate change. Pelosi did not appear — nor did Sen. Dianne Feinstein when the activists stopped by her Pacific Heights mansion earlier in the day — but, if home, the Speaker may have spotted a glimpse of the giant street mural the activists left behind on Broadway at Normandie Terrace. The 16-foot painting advertised the group’s goal: a civilian climate corps to combat global warming. “Invest in us,” the painting read, above the fanning yellow rays emblematic of the youth-led Sunrise Movement that sponsored the protest.

Violent Right Wing Groups Try To Organize In Bay Area

May 16, 2020 It's Going Down. , , ,
Earlier this week, neo-Nazi group Patriot Front vandalized the front of the historic Gilman Street punk music venue (recently closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic) with a stencil promoting its website and various stickers. The graffiti is only the latest in an ongoing campaign by Patriot Front members to promote the organization in the bay area. Local antifascist groups report that Patriot Front stickers have also been recently found (and quickly destroyed) around the UC Berkeley campus and in various bay area cities. Patriot Front is a re-brand of Vanguard America, which grew out of the neo-Nazi web-forum, Iron March. Violent paramilitary organizations such as Atomwaffen, which has been linked to several murders and bombing plots, also grew out of the same online space and such groups continue to have some crossover with Patriot Front.

San Francisco To Pay $369,000 For Police Raid Of Journalist’s Home

March 7, 2020 Nicholas Iovino, Courthousenews.com , ,
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – The city of San Francisco will pay $369,000 to settle claims over its police raid on a journalist’s home and office this past May, an action condemned by press advocates as chilling the ability of reporters to get information from anonymous sources. Police barreled through the front door of freelance reporter Bryan Carmody’s home with a sledgehammer...

San Francisco, CA: Report Back From Lockdown At Chase Corporate Offices In Solidarity With Wet’suwet’en

March 2, 2020 Staff, Itsgoingdown.org , ,
Coastal GasLink is a project of TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada Pipelines, an institution leading multiple extractive energy projects on Indigenous land. Coastal GasLink is a pipeline intended to go across the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation in so-called Canada.

New San Francisco D.A. Inherits Chance To Hold Police Accountable In Shooting Of Man With Mental Illness

January 25, 2020 Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, Theappeal.org , , ,
On Jan. 6, 2017, at about 4:15 a.m., San Francisco Police Department officers Colin Patino and Kenneth Cha arrived at Sean Moore’s home. Moore’s neighbor, who had a temporary restraining order against him, had called police when he heard a knock on their shared wall. Body camera footage shows that Moore answered his door and, in response to their questions, denied violating the restraining order.

Los Angeles And San Francisco Announce They Are Moving Forward With Plans To Start Public Banks

October 11, 2019 Staff, Publicbankinginstitute.org , ,
Close on the heels of the Public Banking Act being signed into law last week, LA City Council President Herb Wesson announced he will be introducing a motion within the week to hire a banking expert to draft a comprehensive plan for a public bank for the City. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that San Francisco was also pushing ahead with plans for a city-owned bank. Wesson announced the motion in a press conference (Facebook link) celebrating the unprecedented success of AB 857 in front of Los Angeles City Hall on Monday Oct 7.

A Bay Area Housing Solution With Worker Empowerment Built In

October 10, 2019 Aaron Fernando, Shareable.net , , ,
As housing crises heat up across American cities, the San Francisco Bay Area is experiencing an extreme disparity: in 2017, it added three times as many jobs as it did new housing units for those workers. To address this challenge, the region and others will need to embrace a number of different complementary solutions. One creative solution, available for decades but growing in popularity, is bottom-up in its nature: the granny flat. Technically known as Accessory Development Units (ADUs), these residencies are small housing units built on existing single-family lots...
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