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San Francisco Hunger Strikers Enter 9th Day To Protest Police Brutality

May 4, 2016 Steven Rosenfeld, www.alternet.org , , ,
By Steven Rosenfeld for AlterNet - A hunger strike protesting police violence and racial injustices against black and brown people has entered its ninth day in San Francisco. Eight men and women—including a Board of Supervisor candidate, two pre-school teachers, local rappers and family members—are camped out on a sidewalk outside the police station in the city’s gentrifying Mission district, which has experienced an exodus of Latino residents and artists in recent years.

San Francisco Becomes First Big US City Requiring Solar Panels On New Buildings

April 22, 2016 Biz Carson, www.businessinsider.com , ,
By Biz Carson for Business Insider - San Francisco may be known for its fog, but the city wants to turn the sunny days it does get into power for its buildings. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously passed legislation that would require new construction that is shorter than 10 floors to install solar panels or solar water heaters on top of both new residential and commercial buildings.

Homeless Forced Out Of Camp They Were Moved To Before Super Bowl

March 2, 2016 Julia Carrie Wong, www.theguardian.com , ,
By Julia Carrie Wong for The Guardian - Residents have been ordered to vacate the San Francisco homeless encampment under a highway overpass after police and public workers pressured the city’s homeless to relocate there from areas of the city slated for Super Bowl 50 festivities. The 21st-century Hooverville became a symbol of the city’s gaping inequality in the run-up to and throughout the week of star-studded Super Bowl festivities in February, rekindling long-running controversies over how the city should address the needs of its nearly 7,000 homeless residents.

Rent Strikes: ‘Together We Can Defeat The Housing Market’

February 24, 2016 Matt Broomfield, www.roarmag.org , ,
By Matt Broomfield for ROAR Magazine - Jose LaCrosby was an African-American hair stylist to the stars. Nina Simone, James Brown and Miles Davis all frequented his San Francisco salon. Terminally ill at the age of 89, LaCrosby was told by his doctors that he should return to die among his friends in Midtown Apartments. But the City of San Francisco had just hiked rents by up to 300 percent. If the Korean War veteran wanted to move back in to a ground-floor apartment it would now cost him $3700 a month. LaCrosby had lived in Midtown for two decades, but he spent the last 7 months of his life under fluorescent lights in an anodyne hospice ward, unable to afford the grossly inflated rent.

San Francisco Herding Homeless Out Of Sight For Superbowl Parties

February 1, 2016 Evelyn Nieves, www.alternet.org ,
By Evelyn Nieves for AlterNet - The first official signs of Super Bowl 50—six-foot-tall, 1,600-pound, solar-powered number 50s, each with its own Super Bowl-themed design—started popping up at photogenic landmarks around San Francisco two weeks ago. The first unofficial signs—rows of tents and tarps lining a major thoroughfare under the I-80 freeway to the Bay Bridge—started popping up two months ago. That’s when Oscar McKinney, a 49-year-old hearse driver, pitched a tent on the sidewalk across from a Best Buy parking lot.

Black Homes Matter: San Francisco’s Vanishing Black Population

January 21, 2016 Carl Finamore, www.beyondchron.org , , ,
By Carl Finamore for BeyondChron - This story is prompted by a picket sign I saw at a recent anti-police brutality protest sponsored by two San Francisco families, one Latino and one Black, whose sons were shot dead in separate incidents following a barrage of police bullets. Among the crowd of 150 activists standing in the pouring rain in front of the police-barricaded Bayview police station, were four young people holding a sign that simply read, "The Last 3 Percent." I thought their message was both powerful and poignant.

How A Union Built Integrated, Affordable Housing

January 5, 2016 Peter Cole, www.daily.jstor.org , , ,
By Peter Cole for Jstor Daily - In the 1960s, battles over racial equality and “urban renewal” ripped San Francisco apart. Beginning the decade prior, residents of the Fillmore, the only black-majority part of the city, suffered from a “slum clearance” program, labeled “Negro removal” by the legendary writer and activist James Baldwin. In response, a small but powerful labor union—the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, or ILWU[1]— attacked the city’s lack of affordable housing and pervasive residential segregation. In the heart of San Francisco, this union financed an integrated housing development for working-class people.

Bayview Crowd Calls For Police Chief To Quit Over Death

December 6, 2015 Vivian Ho, www.sfgate.com , , ,
By Vivan Ho for the San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco, CA - A community meeting erupted into outrage Friday night as San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr attempted to explain the shooting death of a man by police in the Bayview neighborhood that drew ire nationwide after video of the incident was widely circulated on social media. (The video.) unnamed (6) Police Commission President Suzy Loftus (left), San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr and Bayview Station Capt. Raj Vaswani listen to the combative crowd at the town hall meeting. Dozens of community members packed a room at the City College of San Francisco southeast facility, calling for Suhr’s resignation as he told the crowd that officers fatally shot Mario Woods, 26, “in defense” of both themselves and bystanders at the scene. Woods died shortly after at least five officers fired at him about 15 times in the Bayview neighborhood about 4:30 p.m.Wednesday.

Urban Activists Set Out To Sue San Francisco’s Suburbs

September 18, 2015 Heather Smith, www.grist.org , , ,
By Heather Smith in Grist - The first time I heard of Sonja Trauss, she was mobilizing San Franciscans to support new apartment construction. This was not a campaign that went over well in the Mission District, a formerly working-class neighborhood that was in the middle of a full-on freakout over how many people seemed to want to build luxury condos there. One night, when I was walking down 24th Street, I saw that someone had taped up fliers to telephone poles with pictures of Trauss on them. Her eyes had been whited out and replaced by dollar signs. Based on this backstory, I assumed Trauss must be one of the numerous young real estate professionals who come to the Bay Area to seek their fortunes.

San Francisco’s Deepening Rent Crisis Pushes Teachers Out

September 13, 2015 Peter Moskowitz, www.theguardian.com , ,
By Peter Moskowitz for the Guardian - Soaring rents in San Francisco are pushing school teachers out of the city they work in, union officials fear, causing high turnover rates and reducing the time teachers are able to spend in the classroom because of long commutes. Housing is considered affordable if you can spend under 30% of your income on it, according to federal guidelines. By those standards, no one making the average teacher’s wage of $69,400 a year in San Francisco could afford a one-bedroom rental, for which the median price is $3,500, in any of the city’s neighborhoods. The starting salary for public school teachers is $50,000. Teachers union officials say the number of vacancies in San Francisco school districts has grown higher and higher each year, as the tech boom has transformed the housing market, making the city unaffordable even to veteran teachers.

San Francisco Too Valuable For Poor People*

July 30, 2015 Carl Finamore, www.counterpunch.org , , , ,
By Carl Finamore in CounterPunch - Last year, San Francisco tenant rights’ supporters scored an important victory when voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition K, requiring all new housing developments provide 33% low and moderate-cost units. The objective was to put a lid on the unregulated, speculative construction boom that earned the city its most contentious distinction of being the country’s second most expensive place to live, just after New York City. Housing activists say Prop K was a partial victory but more is needed. That next step of “reining in record-high eviction rates” was announced at a July 27 city hall press conference attended by over 75 community, labor and political leaders. “The data clearly shows that the evictions crisis and resulting loss of rental units” is a big blow to the city meeting its affordable housing goals, said Board of Supervisor Jane Kim.

Obama’s Approval of Arctic Oil Drilling Is A Bitter Betrayal

July 24, 2015 Miyoko Sakashita, www.medium.com , , , , , ,
By Miyoko Sakashita in Medium - The Obama administration had approved Shell’s permits to drill for oil in the Arctic this summer. It came like a punch in the gut. How could he? Not only will this put Arctic wildlife directly in harm’s way of oil spill but it will push us deeper in the very climate crisis that President Obama has vowed time and again to finally address. More than 1 million people had urged the president to keep oil drilling out of the Arctic. Just last weekend, thousands of people around the world took to the streets and their local waterways to say “Shell No” to drilling in the far north. Obama didn’t just defy environmentalists around the world who have been calling for the Arctic to be kept off-limits to offshore drilling, he betrayed his own stated values and cast a dark shadow across the United States’ role as a world leader in transitioning the planet to the clean energy future it desperately needs.

San Francisco Unanimously Opposes Fast Track

April 21, 2015 Food & Water Watch and Electronic Frontier Foundation, www.PopularResistance.org , ,
Another major Pacific port city, San Francisco, has voted against fast track for the TPP. We recently reported on Seattle's City Council unanimously opposing fast track, now the SF Board of Supervisors has also unanimously opposed the bill. The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes about the vote in "San Francisco Opposes TPP Fast Track in New Resolution" and urges people to tweet Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer. Pelosi and Hoyer are key votes on fast track as they tend toward supporting President Obama, but they also do not want to be out of step with the Democratic House members. Pelosi has a history of opposing fast track legislation. The Board of Supervisors vote should help push Pelosi to come out in opposition to fast track. In addition, the ranking member on the Ways and Means Committee, Sander Levin, has also come out in strong opposition saying it is his mission to "defeat the Hatch-Wyden bill," further pushing Pelosi and Hoyer to stay with the Democratic Caucus which overwhelmingly opposes fast track.

Oakland Protests Occupy City Hall

April 16, 2015 Bay City News, www.sfbay.ca , ,
Protesters against police killings marched through Oakland Tuesday afternoon, taking over Oakland City Hall, entering a Laney College cafeteria, and briefly blocking an on-ramp to Interstate Highway 880. About 200 demonstrators gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza starting at about 1 p.m. behind a banner adorned with the faces of black and Hispanic people killed by police over the last several years. Speakers linked the police shootings to the larger criminal justice system, which they said is racially biased, imprisoning black and Hispanic people at far higher rates than white people. After numerous speakers, including several organizers with the Revolutionary Communist Party, the protesters flooded into City Hall, posing at the top of the stairs, blowing whistles that deafeningly echoed through the building’s high ceilings.

Why SF Needs To Use Public Lands For Public Benefit

April 6, 2015 Joseph Smooke and Dylan Ruiz, www.truth-out.org , , ,
A record number of students are homeless. Essential nonprofit organizations are being displaced from the communities they serve. Small, locally owned businesses can't survive as rents soar. The angst that is swelling throughout San Francisco and pushing outward to other Bay Area cities is not because people are resisting change. The angst is over the largest growing inequality gap in the country. At the forefront of people's concerns is how much people now have to spend on rent. Market-rate housing is catering to the region's new wealth, while the government is rolling out policies to make the city a rich man's playground.
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