San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/2020/05/)
Beginning today, San Francisco officials will be enforcing an 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily curfew. Mayor London Breed announced the curfew, and said the National Guard was standing by, Saturday night after unrest broke out in the city’s downtown area.
Muni is running only a core system of buses with no rail lines in service. But around 100,000 people still ride every day. Cat Carter, interim executive director of the San Francisco Transit Riders, hasn’t been on Muni in months, but she and others in the organization have kept busy.
The shelter-in-place order that has directed San Francisco residents to stay home except to conduct essential business will be in effect indefinitely, though certain previously restricted businesses will soon be allowed to re-open. Meanwhile, the city’s mask order will be expanded, now requiring everyone to cover their noses and mouths within 30 feet of another person.
San Francisco has approved temporary encampments to slow the spread of COVID-19. But in Seattle, a half-decade experiment with regulated sites has proved so much more successful at getting people off the streets than other solutions that officials recently voted to expand it fourfold.
The San Francisco Unified School District has announced that fall classes will begin on Aug. 17, and administrators are in the process of planning how campuses will function as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. They are challenged with figuring out how to keep students safe and make classes engaging whether they are held remotely or in modified classroom settings. We heard directly from students about what life has been like for them under the shelter-in-place order.
Twenty-nine recreational vehicles leased by San Francisco to house homeless residents during the pandemic were never used for their intended purpose, an endeavor that may have cost the city as much as half a million dollars, a city official confirmed.
Every year, San Francisco Pride events bring hundreds of thousands of people to the city during the last week of June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots in New York City, which kicked off the modern LGBTQ movement. This year was expected to be larger than ever, marking the 50th anniversary of San Francisco’s first march, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced its abrupt cancellation on April 14, 2020.
Instead of celebrating milestones as they prepare to enter what a few months ago was the best job market in half a century, college students throughout the Bay Area are worrying about their futures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the historic wave of unemployment it has unleashed.
The morning of Nov. 8, 2018, a fire sparked in rural Northern California. It grew to disastrous proportions faster than some fire experts thought possible, and ultimately destroyed the town of Paradise and devastated several nearby communities.
The San Francisco school district’s Stay Over Program has played a major role in sheltering homeless students and their families and helping them move to more stable situations since the shelter-in-place rules were implemented. Service providers worry they may be joined in a few months by many more newly homeless students as job losses mount and more families get evicted.
