By Mary Rees, KALW Crosscurrents As California sloshes through its rainy season, homeless people around the Bay Area are looking for places to stay dry. In San Francisco, the spaces under freeways are popular, and groups of homeless people sometimes band together for their mutual protection. Still, as you might expect, living on the streets […]
Yearly Archives: 2012
Posted inCity Hall, Community, Social Justice
San Francisco to Pilot Participatory Budgeting
Residents in San Francisco’s northeastern corner will soon get a say in how a small piece of San Francisco’s budget is spent improving their neighborhood. Supervisor David Chiu announced last week that residents of District 3, which includes North Beach, Chinatown and part of the Financial District, could vote on how to spend $100,000 in discretionary funds. It’s part of a civic innovation called participatory budgeting, with the money earmarked for one-time community projects.
Posted inNews
A Day at Bolerium, Mission Street’s Radical Bookstore
By Alana Levinson, Mission Local On a sleepy Monday afternoon, Bolerium Books owner John Durham receives a call from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, informing him that his store has made it into the annual “Best of the Bay” issue for the second time. While giving him the good news, they gently try to sell […]
Posted inBack Issues, News
Issue 9: Winter 2013
Thousands of homes in San Francisco are more vulnerable to earthquakes because of delays in mandatory retrofitting. Before this report was published, many landlords and tenants did not know their homes were among those needing upgrades.
Posted inCity Hall, Land use, Muni, Neighborhoods, Transportation
A Central Subway North Beach Station? Not So Easy, Planners Say
A proposal to pull out tunnel-digging machines in North Beach has spurred debate about the prospect of building additional stations to extend the Central Subway project north of Chinatown. But transit officials say that’s not in the current plans, and such a move would take years more planning.
Posted inNews
Treasure Island Development Plans Inching Forward
By Matt Smith and Katharine Mieszkowski, Bay Citizen After a decade of delays, San Francisco is taking concrete steps toward turning the former sandbar known as Treasure Island into a $1.5 billion condominium community. However, obstacles remain for the project, a top priority for three of the city’s mayors. Barriers include political uncertainty about a […]
Posted inNews
Tech Company CrowdFlower Denies Labor Violation
By Erik Neumann, Mission Local CrowdFlower, a tech company based in the Mission District, boasts on its website of having “The World’s Largest Workforce,” performing hundreds of millions of tasks for Web-based client companies. Now, one of those virtual workers has filed a lawsuit in federal court charging that CrowdFlower broke the law by paying […]
Posted inNews
Agency Targeting Community Colleges Is Under Federal Pressure
By Louis Freedberg, EdSource Today via New America Media The commission that accredits California’s community colleges, and has ordered City College of San Francisco to prepare for possible closure, has come under pressure from the federal government to make sure that the colleges under its jurisdiction comply in a timely way with the deficiencies it […]
Posted inNews
SFO to Return $2.1 Million in Misspent Funds
By Zusha Elinson, Bay Citizen The Federal Aviation Administration will take back $2.1 million in stimulus funds that it gave to San Francisco International Airport because the money was used improperly, according to the Department of Transportation’s inspector general. The airport received $14.5 million in stimulus funds to improve runways and taxiways, which was completed […]
Posted inNews
U.S. Supreme Court and Proposition 8: End of the Road or Next Chapter?
By Scott Shafer, KQED News Fix The next and final chapter in the legal saga of Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, is set to begin Friday morning at the U.S. Supreme Court. And unlike the previous legal skirmishes in which this measure has been mired for four years, this one will take place […]