San Francisco

Chesa Boudin On Decarceration In Our Lifetimes

August 28, 2023 Avalon Edwards, In These Times. Strategize! Accountability, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Decarceration, San Francisco

San Francisco joined the short list of cities with reform-oriented prosecutors in 2019 with the election of Chesa Boudin, a rising star in the progressive prosecutor movement. The child of two parents incarcerated for their involvement with the leftist group Weather Underground, Boudin campaigned on ending cash bail, decarceration, and police accountability. The city saw many real results as he followed through on several of these promises his first year in the role. Boudin forbade his staff from requesting money bail under any circumstances, San Francisco’s jail population dropped by 25%, and law enforcement officers were charged in three different police brutality cases.5591

Lessons From San Francisco About Overcoming Our Transit Deficit

August 27, 2023 Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Next City. Create! Cities, Public transportation, San Francisco, Transportation

Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented the United States’ dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the 20th century. But as I show in my new book, “The Great American Transit Disaster,” our transit networks are bad for a very simple reason: We wanted it this way. Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston and San Francisco, I trace the overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. There were a few exceptions to this mostly distressing story – such as San Francisco, where the publicly-owned Municipal Railway, or Muni, offers positive lessons for contemporary policymakers, politicians and voters.

Graffiti Writers Paint Over A Pro-Police ‘Street Art’ Campaign

May 24, 2023 It's Going Down. Resist! California, Capitalism, Graffiti, Police, San Francisco

A “street art” campaign backed by Welsh tech billionaire and venture capitalist Michael Moritz is being targeted by graffiti artists in San Francisco, California. The campaign features posters and even wheat-pastes which call for a “law and order” approach to homelessness and fentanyl related deaths in San Francisco. Moritz, in an effort to further social cleanse the poor from urban core areas, along with many on the Right, have rushed to blame “the Left” for rising homelessness, crime rates and drug use in San Francisco. In February, the New York Times published an editorial by Moritz entitled, Even Democrats Like Me Are Fed Up With San Francisco, which echoed far-Right talking points demonizing those most displaced and excluded from the capitalist system.

San Francisco Considers $5 Million Reparations Payouts

March 16, 2023 Janie Har, Portside. Create! Black America, California, Reparations, San Francisco

San Francisco, California - These were some of the more than 100 recommendations made by a city-appointed reparations committee tasked with the thorny question of how to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism. And the San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing the report for the first time Tuesday voiced enthusiastic support for the ideas listed, with some saying money should not stop the city from doing the right thing. Several supervisors said they were surprised to hear pushback from politically liberal San Franciscans apparently unaware that the legacy of slavery and racist policies continues to keep Black Americans on the bottom rungs of health, education and economic prosperity, and overrepresented in prisons and homeless populations.

1,000 SFO Restaurant Workers Go On Strike

September 26, 2022 Sam Moore, SFGate. Resist! Airport, San Francisco, Strike, Worker Rights

Restaurant workers at San Francisco International Airport declared a general strike early Monday morning after more than nine months of negotiations with their employers. Unite Here Local 2, the union representing SFO's food service workers, announced in a press release that 1,000 of SFO's cashiers, cooks, baristas, bartenders, servers and dishwashers are participating in the strike. The workers are employed by 84 airport restaurant outlets, all of whom are represented by the SFO Airport Restaurant Employer Council. "The workers' compensation is currently not enough to live on," Anand Singh, president of Unite Here Local 2, told SFGATE. "[The employers] have not moved nearly enough to get to the place where we can make a deal on a new contract. And that's why we've had to go down this road."

41 Arrested In San Francisco Airport Fast Food Worker Protest

September 17, 2022 Phil Mayer, KTLA. Resist! Airport, Low Wage Workers, San Francisco, Strike

Forty-one people were arrested Friday at San Francisco International Airport as airport fast food workers protested their wages, according to Unite Here, the union that represents many SFO workers. The protesters sat on the airport road outside Terminal 3, blocking traffic. Hundreds of workers and supporters showed up to join in the protest, chanting and forming picket lines. Politicians such as State Senator Josh Becker and Assemblymember Ash Kalra were also at the protest. Most fast food workers at SFO make $17.05 per hour according to the union, which is less than many meals cost at the airport. Some workers said they have not had a raise in three years and have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. “I have to work two jobs to support my family, and I’m exhausted from living on four hours of sleep a day,” said Lucinda To, a lounge attendant at the United Club and a server at Cat Cora’s Kitchen at SFO.

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

April 21, 2022 Jack Ross, Capital & Main. Organize! California, Housing, San Francisco, Tenant Rights, Unions

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. Organize! California, Housing, San Francisco, Tenant Rights

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. Create! California, Community services, Education, Homelessness, Housing, San Francisco

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. Resist! Mass Incarceration, Police Union, Recall, San Francisco

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. Resist! Air Pollution, Community Control, Environment, San Francisco

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. Resist! Health Care, Medicare for all, Nancy Pelosi, San Francisco

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. Resist! Deportation, Immigrant Rights, Immigration, San Francisco

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. Educate! Class Struggle, Evictions, Housing, San Francisco

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. Resist! climate crisis, Nancy Pelosi, San Francisco, Youth Activism

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.

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