San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/category/news/)
After years of advocacy and shifting plans, construction has begun on Casa Adelante at 1515 South Van Ness, a project set to bring 168 below-market-rate units to the Mission District by 2027 for low-income, formerly homeless, and HIV-affected families.
A lawsuit against San Francisco Superior Court over its routine failure to uphold defendants’ right to a speedy trial is now in the hands of California’s Supreme Court. San Francisco has more than 1,100 cases past statutory time limits, and 115 of those defendants are languishing in jail without a conviction.
The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee shared its final recommendations to remedy historical and ongoing harms to local Black communities.
The state agency responsible for ensuring Uber and Lyft rides are safe failed to consistently track the number of accidents, assaults and drunk driving complaints that occur on them, according to a new study by San Francisco traffic planners.
The California Public Utilities Commission did not even consistently collect the most basic industry information, such as ride requests and miles driven, the report from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority shows.
Sea level rise is forcing cities around San Francisco Bay to weigh demand for new housing against the need to protect communities from flooding. Builders say they can solve this dilemma with cutting-edge civil engineering. But no one knows whether their ambitious efforts will be enough to keep newly built waterfront real estate safe in coming decades.
Meanwhile, developers are busy building — and telling the public that they can mitigate this one effect of climate change, despite mounting evidence that it could be a bigger problem than previously believed.
In the last 13 years, the U.S. Department of Interior has actively reviewed applications for acknowledgement of only 18 tribes, even as hundreds remain in line. The Public Press has identified more than 400 tribes seeking federal recognition and is working to confirm that 200 others with publicly listed applications are genuine.
Many have been waiting for decades. The Death Valley TimbiSha Shoshone Band is the only California tribe that has been recognized in the 44 years since the federal acknowledgement process was established.
More than one month after statewide eviction protections expired on June 30, less than 4% of rent relief funds requested by San Francisco households remain unprocessed, with 55% of funds paid out.
Although a statewide eviction moratorium for tenants with pending rent relief applications expired Thursday, some tenants in San Francisco and Los Angeles saw a glimmer of hope as previously voided local protections kicked back in.
Cities and advocates hope the enactment of new protections will help to fill the gap for struggling tenants facing eviction for rent due after June 30.
A California law enacted in 2021 allows domestic violence victims to claim coercive control — a broad range of behaviors including humiliation, surveillance, intimidation, gaslighting and isolation that strips an intimate partner of a sense of autonomy and personhood.
Experts in domestic violence say judicial skepticism of abuse victims, often with misogynistic overtones, has long been widespread in U.S. family court, creating dangerous hurdles to justice. The expanded conception of domestic violence on paper is of limited use if judges continue to cast a skeptical eye on testimony, usually from women, of manipulation within intimate relationships.
Co-published with ProPublica.
Tabitha Davis had just lost twins in childbirth and was facing homelessness. The 23-year-old had slept on friends’ floors for the first seven months of her pregnancy, before being accepted to a temporary housing program for pregnant women. But with the loss of the twins, the housing program she’d applied to live in after giving birth — intended for families — was no longer an option.
A few weeks later, Davis was informed that the score she’d been given based on her answers to San Francisco’s “coordinated entry” questionnaire wasn’t high enough to qualify for permanent supportive housing. It was a devastating blow after an already traumatizing few months.
If you’re a tenant facing a COVID-19 hardship, it can be difficult to understand how you are — and are not — protected from eviction. Here’s what you need to know.
