San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/category/neighborhoods/page/5/)
City native Victoria Ortiz’s path to homelessness began in the East Bay more than two years ago when she was pregnant, working at a Staples and subletting a room. A housemate stopped forwarding the rent to the landlord, and everyone was evicted. This is the story of her determination to find stable housing for her family while living at a shelter in San Francisco.
A 44-year-old retired firefighter calls herself a “guinea pig” in an experiment to create more shelter for homeless people in San Francisco. For the foreseeable future, she said, how she handles herself will “make or break” a pilot project involving a tiny dwelling on a private lot.
Across the country, 1,400 community clinics that care for some of the poorest people in the United States are anxiously making contingency plans for how to cope with potential funding cuts, all because Congress allowed a critical program to lapse. The impact is already being felt in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
Dozens of residential hotels have rooms to spare, but it is a seller’s market, and city officials cannot force owners to rent. At last count, 4,353 people were unsheltered in San Francisco, with 1,827 empty rooms in private SROs.
Against the backdrop of recent right-wing violence, the organizer of the now-canceled Crissy Field “free speech” rally said he just wanted San Francisco’s moderate “good liberals” to reject the city’s “intolerance” and embrace his message of peace and love. Dubious, officials and counterprotesters sent him a different message.
The story of Box City reflects the city’s shifting approach to homeless encampments and the impact on their residents. Many believed the navigation centers — touted as a model of moving people from “street to home” — would lead to long-term housing. But they were left demoralized and jaded about the government’s ability to help them.
Responding to sea level rise requires actions that fall into three categories: fortify infrastructure, accommodate higher water and retreat from the shoreline. Given the economic and cultural ties Bay Area residents have to the water — retreat is a hard sell.
Two years ago, the California Supreme Court overturned decades of land-use law by upholding lower court rulings that cities could no longer require developers to take into account the effects of climate change on their projects. That decision has unsettled public officials and planners, and critics say it will allow real estate interests to saddle taxpayers with a gigantic bill to defend against rising seas.
A city-commissioned environmental study that detailed how the Mission Bay neighborhood would be inundated by rising seas in coming decades went unpublished for more than a year while two showcase waterfront developments won key approvals from city officials and voters, a Public Press review of records shows.
Officials offer explanations for 18-month delay in releasing city-funded study that foresees serious climate-related flooding in Mission Bay in the decades ahead. The release followed a public-records request by the Public Press.
