San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/category/civic-podcast/)
San Francisco residents who are not citizens but are parents may vote in school board elections, including the upcoming recall election that could remove three members of the board. The Board of Supervisors in October made this enfranchisement, originally enacted through a 2016 ballot measure and scheduled to sunset in 2022, permanent.
A new audit found that few retrofitted buildings have a suspected gas line hazard that caused an uproar earlier this year. But it’s not all good news. Hundreds of buildings overshot the retrofit program’s deadline for seismic work.
Tenants, advocates and city legislators are worried about real estate investors buying multi-unit housing properties like this one only to evict all of the tenants and sell the buildings for a profit. They want the city and the nonprofits it works with to buy those buildings instead of leaving them for speculators to snap up.
The Bay Area can house millions more people without increasing its water use, according to a new report from the urbanist and water-use think tanks SPUR and the Pacific Institute. This could be done by continuing to improve water conservation efforts while concentrating on developing infill housing to prevent urban sprawl.
More than half a century after they occupied the island in a monthslong protest for indigenous sovereignty, Native American activists gathered on Alcatraz on Saturday to watch the nation’s first indigenous secretary of the interior commemorate the occasion.
As a judge in Los Angeles was deciding to end pop singer Britney Spears’ conservatorship, a small group of mental health activists staged a demonstration in front of Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Many said they want to the practice of conservatorship to be abolished.
While veterans are entitled to many benefits, finding them can be complicated and time-consuming. OneVet OneVoice connects veterans with housing, employment, education and healthcare.
A report from the Coalition on Homelessness alleges that the city’s encampment clearing practices are illegal and often fail to connect homeless people to the services they need.
Thousands of delegates from around the world will meet next week in Glasgow, Scotland to discuss their nations’ commitments to addressing the climate crisis at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Among those attending will be local organizers from the NDN Collective, an indigenous-led and -staffed organization.
In Bayview Hunters Point, most residents have already gotten their shots. One community organizer says part of the reason for that high vaccination rate is because of on-the-ground outreach work that local groups have been doing. That work continues and will for the foreseeable future.
Vermin infestation and electrical malfunction. A copy machine in the restroom. Falling ceiling tiles. Parents, students and staff at Buena Vista Horace Mann School in the Mission testified at recent hearings about these and other chronic maintenance problems they say have plagued the school for years. Officials promised swift action, but delayed a vote on how much money to allocate toward repairs at the school by two weeks.
