While COVID-19 deaths have the potential for exponential growth due to the nature of a viral pandemic, they are dwarfed by the number of people who have died from drug overdoses in the city this year.
As of Dec. 16, the San Francisco Department of Public Health reports that 172 people have died from COVID-19. The number of overdose deaths reported through the end of October stood at 570. There were 441 in 2019.
On several streets in the Mission, you can spot sticky notes in the windows of some homes. They’re blank, but they’re sending a message: The residents would like to signal their interest in participating in a neighborhood effort to address crime, trash and visible homelessness in the neighborhood. Nuala Bishari reported on the initiative for the San Francisco Public Press. She talked with “Civic” about what she found and how she learned it.
Rents may be falling, but the Bay Area is still unaffordable and has for years fallen short of its housing construction goals. The construction shortfall is particularly pronounced in subsidized housing. While the pandemic is changing the way people work and socialize and has resulted in economic downturn, acquiring land and building remain expensive. Sarah Karlinsky, senior advisor at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, a public policy think tank better known as SPUR, has published a report indicating that Bay Area municipalities should be constructing 45,000 units of housing per year.
While the availability of personal protective equipment like N-95 masks has improved, a local nurse said nurses are feeling overwhelmed and would be better able to provide care with a bigger staff. For patients, she said, the experience of being hospitalized with COVID-19 is one of isolation. Even nurses limit their interactions with these patients to prevent getting infected, performing their tasks quickly.
Hunger has come along with job losses during pandemic-related shutdowns. In the Bay Area, food banks continue to see long lines. The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank has roughly doubled the number of people it serves since before the pandemic. The cost of procuring that food, meanwhile, is rising as federal aid programs expire.
In 2005, a coalition of advocacy groups working on homelessness formed a coalition to collaborate across cities and states and advance national policy. They called it WRAP, the Western Regional Advocacy Project. Its director, Paul Boden, joined “Civic” to look back on 15 years of organizing and ensuring that people experiencing homelessness themselves inform research and policy.
Young people have led the way on major social and political movements in recent years, from climate action to Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Youth have also been mobilizing to get the right to engage more directly, through local elections.
Public transportation has been transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. San Francisco’s Muni light rail system has been shut for months, and buses are running on core service lines only. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Director Jeffrey Tumlin and Director of Transit Julie Kirschbaum joined “Civic” to explain how Muni has adapted to the pandemic and some of the changes ahead.
San Francisco’s office of the public defender has a unit dedicated to defending immigrants in court. In most states, they often have no representation because there is no right to counsel in immigration cases. Francisco Ugarte, managing attorney of this unit, talked with “Civic” about how handoffs between agencies work and what happens to someone who is arrested by immigration enforcement in San Francisco, as well as a class action suit the unit helped litigate over COVID-19 outbreaks in detention facilities.
Every odd-numbered San Francisco supervisorial district had an election in November. One race was extremely close and several were targeted by big independent expenditure money. But Joe Eskenazi, managing editor at Mission Local, reports that money was apparently ineffective, failing to propel candidates to victory and failing to dissuade voters from passing new tax measures.
