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Public Press Weekly: Assessing the Costs of Wildfires
Last fall’s wildfires in the North Bay and Southern California continue to take a toll in the form of difficulties in getting insurance, housing shortages and rent hikes.
San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/author/michele-anderson/page/2/)
Last fall’s wildfires in the North Bay and Southern California continue to take a toll in the form of difficulties in getting insurance, housing shortages and rent hikes.
Mayor Ed Lee, who died unexpectedly last week, is remembered as a dedicated public servant who leaves behind a complicated legacy.
San Francisco is a great city, but many residents are leaving for more affordable cities, like Sacramento.
California appears to be successfully implementing the Affordable Care Act. Insurers are staying in the exchanges and prices are relatively stable.
The destructive North Bay wildfires have been fully contained, after torching more than 200,000 acres, causing at least 42 deaths and incinerating thousands of homes and businesses, reducing urban landscapes to smoking rubble. Now the post-disaster phase is beginning: recovery.
The Bay Area has its environmental challenges — drought, temblors here and there, and occasional triple-digit temperatures. But climate change has introduced a new threat: sea level rise, with tides predicted to be as much as 10 feet higher before the end of the century (Public Press). We’re doing more than wishing for a different outcome. Recruited to participate in the Resilient by Design project, 10 teams will map strategies for how the Bay Area can best react to future coastal inundations (KQED Science). In a salvo against a soggy future, San Francisco and Oakland have separately sued five major oil companies over the firms’ role in global warming, and the cities want billions to pay for projects protecting Bay Area people and property against rising seas (BuzzFeed News).
Air quality took the spotlight during last week’s record-breaking heat wave when the thermometers maxed out at 106°F on Friday in San Francisco. The scorcher triggered a Spare the Air Day and overworked many an air conditioner, and air-pollution watchdogs were on hand to check out any dips in air quality caused by heat and smoke. Caught in the regulatory crosshairs was the soon-to-be-shuttered Russian Consulate in San Francisco. It got a visit from an air quality inspector all good and ready to check out reports of black smoke belching from the building’s chimney (ultimately, the Russians weren’t slapped with a ticket). The air pollution problem, however, is a more permanent part of the environmental landscape in West Oakland, where emergency room visits for asthma top those in other parts of Oakland.
Want a Painted Lady? Forget about buying a Victorian home, as prices are entering the stratosphere. Creative Commons image by Flickr user Maju Rezende
The housing crisis tops the legislative agenda this week as state lawmakers consider bills (KQED) that include a proposed $4 billion affordable housing bond and a measure creating a real estate fee to raise $250 million to help reduce the housing shortage. Keep your fingers crossed that something good will happen, legislatively speaking, because the housing scene is increasingly grim. Home sales in San Francisco are tanking because of low inventory and high prices (Business Insider).
Photo by David Andrews // Hoodline
The violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., this month and President Donald Trump’s much-criticized response have highlighted the resurgence of hate groups in the United States. White nationalism is on the rise in California and right-wing groups are planning rallies in such cities as San Francisco and Berkeley this weekend. How to react to these rallies has been the subject to fierce discussion: Ignore? Protest — violently or peacefully? Update 5:29 p.m. PT Friday: Patriot Prayer organizer Joey Gibson says he is canceling the Crissy Field rally on Saturday and will instead hold a 2 p.m. press conference in Alamo Square, several blocks from a planned Civic Center counterprotest.
Investigative journalist David Cay Johnston and KALW-FM “Your Call” host Rose Aguilar discuss the “gig economy” at Impact HUB San Francisco. Photo by Noah Arroyo / San Francisco Public Press
A recent program took a hard, unforgiving look at the so-called gig economy and how it affects freelance and contract workers. Rose Aguilar, host of “Your Call” on KALW public radio, interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston. The wide-ranging conversation, followed by a lively Q&A session, dissected how this new economic reality had changed the traditional workplace of salaries and benefits, and had undermined safeguards for working conditions and wages. Johnston, however, did suggest how people and the government could provide possible solutions.