Are the Bay Area’s Largest Downtowns Caught in a Doom Loop?

Stock declines wipe out billions of dollars of paper gains meant for big-ticket expenses

On a recent gloomy afternoon in downtown San Francisco, a handful of tourists waiting to board the city’s famous cable cars watched paramedics strap a barefoot man, moaning and writhing in the throes of an apparent mental health crisis, onto a gurney. As he was loaded into a flashing ambulance, another man frantically shouted obscenities toward police officers at the scene.

Just across the street, Amy Hahn was finishing dress shopping at the Nordstrom store in the Westfield mall. She planned to make a beeline to the nearest BART station. “I am wary of being out in that area,” said Hahn, 26. “I like to minimize that.”

Nordstrom confirmed last week it plans to close the flagship store this summer, along with the nearby Nordstrom Rack — two of the most prominent department stores in the heart of the city. The company cited the changing “dynamics” of downtown, a thinly veiled reference to the perception that crime and homelessness are out of control.

Police data may show otherwise — violent crime has actually fallen in San Francisco in recent years, though property crimes have spiked. And unlike most of the rest of the Bay Area, the city’s homeless population dipped slightly in 2022, according to the latest count. Still, there’s no doubt that San Francisco’s downtown is in crisis.

It’s not the only one. All three of the Bay Area’s largest cities are staring down huge setbacks to their efforts to revitalize urban cores hollowed out by a once-in-a-generation pandemic.

Last month, the Oakland A’s announced the team was decamping for Las Vegas, throwing into flux the city’s plans to redevelop Howard Terminal at the Port of Oakland. The team is leaving behind a $12 billion proposal for a gleaming waterfront stadium with new housing and retail at the site. In San Jose, Google recently announced it was reassessing the timeline for its sprawling Downtown West project, which city officials hope will add homes, shopping and office space for thousands of workers.

Factors cited in the decline of these Bay Area downtowns are numerous: crime, homelessness, income inequality, remote work, online shopping, housing shortages and poor transit alternatives. As the region emerges from the pandemic, an existential question has emerged: Are these challenges the beginning of a “doom loop” that effectively transforms downtowns into ghost towns? Or will the Bay reimagine its relationship with its city centers?

In San Francisco, officials concede a string of high-profile violent attacks, pockets of open-air drug dealing and other safety and quality of life concerns have hampered the city’s recovery after thousands of workers emptied out of downtown offices.

“Public safety is the number one issue I hear about from residents and small businesses every day,” Mayor London Breed said when announcing a measure to increase police overtime in March.

In Oakland too, business owners cite crime as the primary culprit for the challenges facing downtown.

“We get break-ins, four or five businesses every single night in Oakland,” said Ali Albasiery, the owner of a ShopRite grocery. “People are fed up. Some stores are closing up early because of this craziness going on.”

Albasiery said former customers now do their shopping in Pleasanton or Dublin because they’re afraid their cars will be broken into if they come to Oakland. Business owners are afraid to make claims against their insurance because they’re worried they’ll get booted off their policies.

“Businesses are hurting really bad,” Albasiery said. “It’s almost like the Wild West.”

In San Jose on Thursday, Mayor Matt Mahan walked through downtown and met with local businesses alongside law enforcement to emphasize his plans to double the rate at which new police officers are hired. Like other Bay Area mayors, he’s also prioritized building more homeless shelters, increasing access to treatment centers and cracking down on encampments.

“If people don’t feel safe, it’s hard to convince them that anything else matters,” Mahan said.

Officials in San Jose have wrestled with how to reinvigorate the downtown core for decades. In 2021, the city scored a major victory when it approved Google’s plans to build a massive 80-acre master-planned neighborhood near the SAP Center and Diridon Station.

But the development was cast into uncertainty in February when, on the heels of moves to cut jobs and slash office space amid growing economic unease, the tech giant said it was “assessing how to best move forward with Downtown West.”

While the company says it’s committed to the multi-decade project — planned for 4,000 homes and office space for up to 20,000 workers — the news is raising fresh concerns about San Jose’s downtown aspirations.

Bryan Garrett, the longtime owner of Cafe Rosalena near the site of the planned project, said many local business owners are worried Google won’t follow through on its promise to revitalize the sleepy western half of downtown. “For lease” signs continue to pop up nearby along The Alameda, a portion of the historic El Camino Real road that the city has long targeted for redevelopment.

“It would give much-need life to a city with no soul,” Garrett said.

Regionally, plans to revitalize downtowns are as wide-ranging as the challenges. Various local officials, advocacy groups and business interests have pushed for more mixed-use housing, better access to transit, adding bike lanes, removing freeways and increasing green spaces.

The hope is to prevent a dreaded economic “doom loop,” which could happen like this: Office buildings remain empty. Thus, stores and restaurants that used to serve downtown workers continue to shutter. Property and sales taxes then plummet. Forced to slash essential services, cities fail to get a handle on homelessness and crime, causing even more people to avoid city centers. The vicious cycle feeds on itself.

To stave off that fate, city leaders must imagine new ways to make downtowns places where people want to spend their time, said Gary Dillabough, a developer behind many large commercial buildings in San Jose. He suggested transforming vacant offices into museums, technology centers or even indoor farms.

“You can let the wind blow you, or you can create your own weather,” Dillabough said.

Across the Bay Area, cities are taking the first steps to do so.

In Oakland, Mayor Shen Thao said the city is moving forward with other redevelopment opportunities for Howard Terminal — even without the A’s. Just this week, a company that crafts creative works spaces signed a deal to manage three floors and recruit new tenants to the iconic Tribune Tower building downtown.

“I don’t believe this city is defined by Major League Baseball,” Thao said last month. “We are working really hard to ensure that (future) developers can be fast-tracked if the development makes sense to the city.”

In San Francisco, a program called “Vacant to Vibrant” is offering grants to lure local pop-ups downtown. And new rules, approved last week by the city’s planning commission, could make it easier to convert empty commercial buildings to housing and allow more uses for vacant retail space in Union Square, San Francisco’s central shopping hub now plagued with boarded-up storefronts.

Mayor Mahan is proposing a similar grant program for downtown San Jose. City officials there are also encouraging commercial-to-residential conversions, though developers say such projects remain a difficult and expensive proposition.

Click here to read the full article at The Mercury News

Nordstrom, Saks Off Fifth Announce They Are Leaving San Francisco

The three locations are the latest retail chain stores to leave the city

High-end department stores Nordstrom and Saks Off Fifth became the latest retail stores to vacate San Francisco on Tuesday, with the 3 large locations representing over 500,000 square feet of retail space expected to be completely vacated by the early fall.

For several years, large chains and small businesses alike have been leaving San Francisco, either closing permanently or relocating operations outside the city. In the case of small businesses, some have left the area entirely, moving out of state or to other areas in the state. For the last few years, for example, Walgreens has closed more and more stores in the city due to the massive amount of crime within its stores. Higher-end stores have also cited break-ins and crime as major reasons for leaving. And just within the last two months, all Amazon Go storesAnthropologie, several high-end Union square stores, and the flagship Whole Foods store have all announced that their doors will be closing, along with multiple non-chain stores throughout the city.

While crime has been cited as the main reason for many going, high rent costs, a lack of customers coming in due to the concurrent office exodus from the city, the homeless crisis keeping many away from parts of the city, and the overall decline of retail have all played a factor in the high number of businesses leaving. On Tuesday, all of those factors caused both Nordstrom and Saks Off Fifth to leave as well.

Nordstrom will be closing both of their San Francisco locations, one in Westfield Mall and the other, a Nordstrom Rack, in the downtown area. Both will wait until their leases are up, with the downtown Nordstrom rack closing on July 1st and the mall location on August 31st. While the closures could be looked into as part of the overall decline of retail, the company proved this to be false by announcing 5 new locations to be opened up across the state, including 4 ringing the Bay Area.

They also specifically noted the worsening conditions for the stores in the city, stating in an e-mail that “the dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years, impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.”

The Westfield mall also released a statement about the closure, noting in a statement that “the planned closure underscores the deteriorating situation in Downtown San Francisco. A growing number of retailers and businesses are leaving the area due to the unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area. We have expressed serious concerns to city leaders for many years and urged the city to find solutions to the key issues and lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity.”

Saks, meanwhile, announced that their Saks Off 5th location on Market Street is due to close this fall after more than 8 years in the city. The Saks off 5th, located right by the Nordstrom Rack location, will be the only location closing in the area, with other Saks Off 5th locations in Petaluma, Milpitas, and Livermore remaining open, and the Saks 5th Avenue location in San Francisco also remaining open for now.

“We are committed to offering support and assistance to our team impacted by the closing. Eligible associates will receive appropriate employment separation packages and transfer opportunities will be explored where feasible.”

Nordstrom, Saks Off Fifth to leave city by the Fall

City officials were disappointed by  the decision of the retailers, noting that they were increasing police presence at the locations where the stores are leaving and that other public safety measures had been enacted in recent years. However, the multitude of problems proved to be too much for the companies in the end.

“The City worked with Westfield to approve an office allocation and plan to reduce Nordstrom’s square footage and bring in additional office uses to the property,” said the Mayor’s office. “This plan made it through the Planning Commission but no further steps were taken on this plan,” said the spokesperson. “Westfield then began speaking about other options for redevelopment. The City has been eager to get a concrete plan from them that we could explore, however, they never brought us anything for review.”

However, security and safety experts have pointed out that not enough is still being done, with more businesses likely to leave soon as more leases come up for renewal.

“More big name stores left. This isn’t really a surprise anymore,” explained Bay Area security consultant and former policeman Frank Ma to the Globe on Tuesday. “The city just keeps refusing to do what is needed to be done. Get more officers, increase the number of prosecutions, and give economic incentives for these businesses to stay. Right now they are just not getting any.”

“It’s getting to the point where I am giving security consults to the same locations now. One place I did last week I had also swept through just before COVID in 2020 and then again in 2018. Another place I did at the exact same time in 2022 and 2021. All for new businesses coming in. That’s the turnaround in some places now. And those are the lucky ones, as many retail spaces are empty.”

Office space vacancy alone is around 30% across the city.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

Board This Train at Night, Wake Up in San Francisco

Luxury overnight rail line planned for summer 2024

The last time an overnight train connected Los Angeles and San Francisco was 55 years ago.

A Newport Beach-based startup wants to turn back the clock with its version of a “hotel train.”

The luxury overnight train could soon provide a new way to travel between San Francisco and L.A., if Dreamstar Lines Inc. can get its plans approved by California rail lines.

The idea for the privately run night train would function as an almost railway red-eye, but with comfortable accommodations so people could get a full night’s sleep before waking up at their destination, said Dreamstar Chief Executive Jake Vollebregt. If the small company’s plan moves forward, he said the new trains could be running by the summer of 2024.

“I think it would represent a renewal of rail,” Vollebregt said. “For those travelers who have had enough of the security checks and the waiting and the delays [on airlines], we’ll be appealing to them.”

Dreamstar hopes to tap into just a small portion of the massive market for travel between two of California’s largest cities.

Travel between L.A. and San Francisco has become one of the nation’s busiest flight routes, according to recent statistics from OAG Aviation. More than 250,000 airplane seats a month fly between the two cities, OAG data show; Dreamstar plans to provide private rooms for about 65 people per trip — far less than a commercial flight.

Vollebregt said Dreamstar’s service would be “more like a private jet company than a big airline,” focused on the specialized niche of “upscale, overnight, hotel train service.” Its night trains would travel in each direction, departing around 10 p.m. and arriving the next day around 8 a.m., Vollebregt said.

The five or six sleeping cars would offer three types of private rooms: single roomettes, executive-class double bedrooms or first-class staterooms — the latter two having private bathrooms — and a car for drinks, dessert and continental breakfast, he said. The trains would have multiple stops in both L.A. and San Francisco, startup officials said, and a stop and crew-change point in San Luis Obispo.

One-way tickets would cost about $300, $600 and $1,000, depending on the tier of room, which Vollebregt said is higher than typical airfare, but below other North American sleeper trains.

An overnight passenger train — Southern Pacific’s LARK — ran between the two influential California cities for about two decades beginning in the 1940s, but the service ended in 1968. Amtrak in the 1980s began operating an overnight train from Sacramento to L.A. that stopped in Oakland, but it lasted only two years.

Amtrak currently offers a variety of long-distance travel across California during the day, but none direct from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The Coast Starlight connects L.A. to Oakland and Emeryville, while the San Joaquin route goes from the same Bay Area stops to Bakersfield, but requires a separate bus trip to get to L.A.

“For day trips, travelers have limited options for morning arrivals in either direction or flying up the night before,” Vollebregt said. “Why not a night train so travelers can sleep and wake up at their destination?”

He said the “gold standard” for the concept is based on Japan’s well-run railway system, which he called “very prompt and comfortable and very affordable.” He hopes his team can bring that concept to California, and eventually expand between other metropolitan areas.

But the next step, Vollebregt said, is getting approval and support from necessary stakeholders and railway operators, which includes Union Pacific, which owns most of the Coast Line route the train hopes to use, as well as Metrolink in Southern California and Caltrain closer to San Francisco.

Officials from both Union Pacific and Metrolink confirmed they are in talks with Dreamstar representatives, but neither has reached any type of agreement yet. It wasn’t immediately clear if talks had started with Caltrain.

“The biggest challenge is getting buy-in from the agencies and the private companies that own the lines and the terminals,” Vollebregt said. He is hopeful to begin services in the summer of 2024, but said “it depends on how quickly our partners are willing to move.”

Scott Johnson, a spokesperson for Metrolink, said Dreamstar representatives had recently “presented very high-level plans for the proposed service.”

“More in-depth details and analysis would be needed for the service to move forward,” Johnson said in a statement.

Vollebregt admits there are still a lot of questions about the venture, including how scalable and sustainable it would be as a business, as well as nailing down the physical infrastructure and logistics. But he said Dreamstar has spent years researching the feasibility and is confident in its current plans.

Click here to read the full article in the LA Times

A look at homicides in SF this year, in light of Cash App founder Bob Lee’s stabbing death

Because this is a high-profile case, the police department is giving Cash App founder Bob Lee’s case a lot of attention. But what about the other homicides this year?

There have been 13 reported homicides in San Francisco so far, according to police records.

The latest one, which has received the most attention, took place on April 4. The victim, Bob Lee, a tech executive. It remains unsolved.

To be fair to the families, we took a closer look at the other 12 cases.

INTERACTIVE: Take a look at the ABC7 Neighborhood Safety Tracker

Gavin Boston, a 40-year-old security guard, was killed on Jan. 4 just outside the Japan Center Mall. Two teenage boys, 14 and 15, were arrested in connection to the killing that came as Boston escorted one of them out of the mall.

Police have been able to solve two other homicide cases this year. One took place in the Excelsior District in January, the other in the Hunters Point neighborhood in February. Two people were arrested for those two separate crimes.

Three more murders occurred in March, but the victims remain unidentified.

Another homicide on April 1 in the Tenderloin also remains open and active.

Judy Solem and Don Carr’s son, Samuel St. Pierre, is not one of the 2023 homicides. The 32-year-old was shot and killed on June 19, 2022 in the Marina District while visiting San Francisco. A surveillance camera captured the suspect’s car yet no one has been arrested. There is a $50,000 reward for any information.

“The car pulled up,” Carr said. “He went over. They had some brief conversation through the driver’s side. He backed up and they shot him twice.”

Between 2000 and 2008, San Francisco investigators had an abysmal record when solving homicides and arresting suspects. But in 2009 and the following years, the clearance rate improved, reaching a high in 2018 of 96 percent. By 2021, the last year this data is available, the solved-case rate was 75 percent.

Why? It may be due to staffing levels.

There were 2,306 sworn officers in 2018, when the clearance rate was so high. In 2021, that number went down to 2,129.

“I’m sure they’re overwhelmed and doing all they can but you put yourself in our shoes. You are never going to think it’s enough until it’s solved, said Carr.

Is San Francisco’s violent crime as “horrific” as tech execs claim? Data shows the City by the Bay has problems like many others across the country. But the statistics don’t support the claims many are putting online. Go here for the full report.

Click here to read the full article at ABC News

Reparations for Black Californians Could Top $800 Billion

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — It could cost California more than $800 billion to compensate Black residents for generations of over-policing, disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination, economists have told a state panel considering reparations.

The preliminary estimate is more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget, and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span. Nor does the figure count compensating people for property unjustly taken by the government or devaluing Black businesses, two other harms the task force says the state perpetuated.

Black residents may not receive cash payments anytime soon, if ever, because the state may never adopt the calculations. The reparations task force met Wednesday to discuss the numbers and can vote to adopt the suggestions or come up with its own figures. The proposed calculations and figures come from a consulting team of five economists and policy experts.

“We’ve got to go in with an open mind and come up with some creative ways to deal with this,” said Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer. He’s one of two lawmakers on the task force responsible for mustering support from state legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

In an interview prior to the meeting, Jones-Sawyer said he needed to consult budget analysts and others before deciding whether the scale of payments is feasible.

The estimates aren’t new. They came up in a September presentation as the consulting team sought guidance on whether to calculate damages using a national or California-specific model.

But the task force must now settle on a cash amount as it nears a July 1 deadline to recommend to lawmakers how California can atone for its role in perpetuating racist systems that continue to undermine Black people. The final decision rests with the state government.

For those who support reparations, the staggering $800 billion estimate underscores the long-lasting harm Black Americans have endured, even in a state that never officially endorsed slavery.

Several people who gave public comment Wednesday spoke of the urgent need to pay Black Americans for all that was taken from them.

“My family came from the South because they were running for their lives, they were fearful of being lynched, just for voting,” said Charlton Curry of Sacramento, California, who discusses reparations on his Big C Sports podcast.

“Cash payments are necessary. Money talks,” he said, noting that white people benefited from free U.S. government land through the 1862 Homestead Act, and Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II and Jewish Holocaust victims received reparations.

Critics pin their opposition partly on the fact that California was never a slave state and say current taxpayers should not be responsible for damage linked to events that germinated hundreds of years ago.

Bob Woodson, a prominent Black conservative, calls reparations impractical, controversial and counterproductive.

“No amount of money could ever ‘make right’ the evil of slavery, and it is insulting to suggest that it could,” he said in an email to The Associated Press, adding that Black communities relied on faith and family to build thriving communities following slavery. “Some of these communities only began coming apart after we lost sight of these values, which also hold the key to these communities’ restoration.”

Financial redress is just one part of the package being considered. Other proposals include paying incarcerated inmates market value for their labor, establishing free wellness centers and planting more trees in Black communities, banning cash bail, and adopting a K-12 Black studies curriculum.

Reparations talks are stalled at the federal level, but the idea flourished in California as well as U.S. cities and counties following the death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police. Newsom signed legislation in 2020 creating the reparations task force.

An advisory committee in San Francisco has recommended $5 million payouts, as well as guaranteed income of at least $97,000 and personal debt forgiveness for qualifying individuals. Supervisors expressed general support, but stopped short of endorsing specific proposals. They’ll take up the issue later this year.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday said from Ghana that she and President Joe Biden support a reparations study, but the president has so far sidestepped calls from advocates to create a federal commission.

The statewide estimate includes $246 billion to compensate eligible Black Californians whose neighborhoods were subjected to aggressive policing and prosecution in the “war on drugs” from 1970 to 2020. That would translate to nearly $125,000 for every person who qualifies.

The numbers are approximate, based on modeling and population estimates. The economists also included $569 billion to make up for the discriminatory practice of redlining in housing loans. That would amount to about $223,000 per eligible resident from 1933 to 1977. The $569 billion is considered a maximum and assumes all 2.5 million Californians who identify as Black would be eligible.

But they won’t all be. People must meet residency and other requirements for monetary compensation. They also must be descendants of enslaved and freed Black people in the U.S. as of the 19th century, which leaves out Black immigrants.

Click here to read the full article in AP News

San Francisco Reparations Committee Admits $5 Million Payment Has No Basis

‘The Committee’s credibility sunk to a new low today’

The San Francisco reparations committee announced on Tuesday that the controversial one time payment of $5 million per black resident’ reparations figure proposed in January has not mathematical basis, and is instead based on “what could represent a significant enough investment.”

In the last few years following the George Floyd incident, reparations proposals for African-Americans have popped up across the United States. Statewide, a Reparations Task Force was approved by the Legislature and Governor in the summer of 2020 and has been meeting ever since to create a recommendation on what reparations could be for Californians whose ancestors were slaves in the US before 1865. Last year, the task force limited the reparation proposal to descendants of slaves only instead of all black Californians, called for reparations to be given despite California being a free-state since it’s inception, and estimated that $569 billion is owed to black Californians.

With a looming deadline, the Task Force is struggling on eligibility requirements, compensation calculation, and numerous other issues. May have noted that even if a recommendation is formulated, there will be numerous legislative challenges, legal challenges, and other hurdles that would likely end any future reparations plans.

However, while the Reparations Task Force has been working on a statewide proposal, San Francisco formed their own committee, the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee. Since being founded in 2020, the Committee has worked on what citywide reparations could possibly look like. As of Wednesday, the Committee currently defines those eligible in the city as being 18 or older, being listed as black or African-American on public documents for at least the past decades, and two or more of the following:

  • Having been born or migrating to the city between 1940 and 1996 as well as showing proof of at least 13 years of residency
  • Having been incarcerated due to the war on drugs or being the direct descendant of someone who was
  • Being a descendant of someone who was enslaved before 1865
  • Having been displaced between 1954 and 1973 or being a descendant of someone who did
  • Being part of a marginalized group who experienced lending discrimination in the city between 1937 and 1968 or in formerly redlined communities within the city between 1968 and 2008

While housing funds, job creation, and other benefits have been discussed as reparations within the city, the Committee recommended a controversial one-time $5 million payment per qualified black resident in January. The figure generated widespread criticism in San Francisco and across the country, with the Committee defending the figure by saying that the payment “would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy.”

Opponents pressed Committee members on how the figure was formulated and on what metrics they were using. Many compared it to the state plan and how open they were being with their process.

“The Task Force’s initial ‘$569 billion’ figure at least tried to show their work,” said legal adviser Richard Weaver to the Globe on Wednesday. “They based it on the housing wealth gap and how much black residents lost in the past due to different polices. Flawed? Very much so. Passable in the Legislature? Not with California’s budget. Laughable? Yes. But they at least showed how they came up with it.  They showed their work.”

“San Francisco on the other hand has been shady. It’s good that they nailed down who exactly would be eligible in the proposal, but they never said how they arrived at that $5 million figure. It always seemed like too round a figure.”

“There wasn’t a math formula”

The figure was immediately lambasted, with local lawmakers explaining that the city did not have the money for such a reparations plan and would have to severely cut into city services or raise taxes to make it happen. However, the estimated figure remained. After weeks of demands by city residents, Committee Chairman Eric McDonnell finally revealed how the figure was calculated on Tuesday. According to McDonnell, it wasn’t.

“There wasn’t a math formula,” said McDonnell in a Washington Post interview. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”

The remark brought considerable outrage on Tuesday and Wednesday. While committee members attempted to defend it, saying that a price tag couldn’t be put on the horrors of slavery and discrimination, many simply noted that there was no justification behind the figure and failed  to even try to give a basic estimate overview.

“This is just a bunch of like-minded people who got in the room and came up with a number,” said San Francisco Republican Party Chairman John Dennis. “You’ll notice in that report, there was no justification for the number, no analysis provided. This was an opportunity to do some serious work and they blew it.”

Others noted on Wednesday that support for reparations in the city has begun to evaporate even more as a result.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

‘We’re Not Victims of Circumstances’: Here’s How Mayor Breed Plans to Revive San Francisco

Mayor London Breed laid out a vision for how to revive San Francisco in her annual State of the City address Thursday, pledging to tackle the city’s biggest challenges, including the housing crisispublic safety concerns and a struggling downtown.   

Breed unveiled proposals to pump $25 million more into overtime for a Police Department struggling to fill vacancies and to revitalize downtown by lightening the tax burden on businesses, and reiterated her plan for how to build 82,000 homes in eight years. 

The mayor painted a picture of San Francisco as resilient and stressed she was committed to its economic recovery and addressing its social issues as the city struggles nearly three years after the pandemic began. She spoke to a packed crowd of city officials, politicians and residents, who greeted her arrival with cheers.

“We are San Franciscans,” Breed said inside the glass atrium of a modern building in the Dogpatch neighborhood, which hosts a satellite communications company and tech human resources business. “We’re not beholden to past catastrophes. We’re not victims of circumstances. We are the captains of our own ship. We are the City That Knows How.” 

Since her address last year, Breed’s had political wins and losses. While the city celebrated a drop in homelessness, it’s struggled to contain a lethal drug epidemic and open-air drug dealing, despite Breed’s efforts to do so in the Tenderloin. The moderate Democratic mayor clashed with more progressive supervisors over housing policy and the limits of her own power.  

“The last few years have been tough, and our challenges ahead are even tougher: public safety concerns, a spiraling fentanyl crisis, empty offices, shuttered businesses, and profound learning loss among our kids,” Breed said from Pier 70, a once industrial neighborhood on the waterfront that’s being redeveloped. “I know we can overcome these, in part because, through four consecutive elections last year, our voters re-instilled every level of our government with a mandate to get the basics right, to put children before politics, to put results before posturing.” 

Breed now has another year in office to show results after elections last year extended her term to January 2025. Voters also gave her the ability to pick political allies to fill vacancies after two historic recalls. In her speech, Breed praised two of her appointees, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and Supervisor Matt Dorsey, both of who won election in November, and new Supervisor Joel Engardio, who ousted a progressive incumbent, pointing out all three are focused on public safety. 

“I’ve been waiting for help like this, for a long time,” Breed said. 

What Breed didn’t have to wait on was control of the Police Department, whose chief she also appoints, to pursue her top priority of public safety. 

More than a year ago, Breed promised to crack down on open-air drug dealing and use as part of her three-month emergency to tackle the overdose crisis in the Tenderloin. But critics took issue with her promises of a crackdown, calling it a second War on Drugs, and she struggled to make meaningful change, according to people who live and work in the neighborhood. 

But tides shifted when San Franciscans, furious about crime, ousted progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who critics perceived as too lenient. To replace him, Breed picked Jenkins, who promised to balance criminal justice reform with accountability for repeat offenders, including drug dealers. 

Over the past year, Breed has pumped money into the Police Department to help recruit and fill vacancies and has added community ambassadors downtown to deal with drug use and other issues. Many residents have welcomed changes, but some have accused the city of just pushing problems out of sight. 

“I am not OK with open-air drug dealing in this City. Period,” Breed said Thursday. She stressed home and business break-ins also require timely responses, but the city needs officers to respond. 

Breed announced Thursday she would introduce a $25 million budget supplemental to fund police overtime to get the department through the end of the fiscal year while it continues to try to hire new officers. The money — which the Board of Supervisors would need to approve — comes on top of the Police Department’s $713 million budget in fiscal year 2023, an increase of $50 million from the year before. The overtime will come out of the city’s $108 million general reserve. 

Click here to read the full article on the San Francisco Chronicle

In Endorsing Schiff for Senate, Pelosi Rewarded Her Most Valued Trait: Loyalty

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi typically throws out endorsements in high-profile Democrat-on-Democrat races like manhole covers. She sat out Hillary vs. Barack in 2008, didn’t weigh in on Hillary vs. Bernie in 2016 until it didn’t really matter, and held her nod for Joe Biden in 2020 until he was the presumptive nominee.

But one of the main factors that inspired Pelosi to endorse Rep. Adam Schiff in California’s 2024 Senate race over two female House members came down to a quality she holds sacrosanct: loyalty.

“Loyalty is a real big factor with Nancy Pelosi, and friendship is inviolable,” John Lawrence, Pelosi’s former chief of staff, told me. “It’s almost like family.”

In Schiff, Pelosi has long had a loyal lieutenant, someone she has supported since he was elected in 2000. She counted on him to lead the House Intelligence Committee in the early, tumultuous years of the Trump administration when a Trump loyalist, former Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, was his counterpart on the panel and was “providing political cover” to the administration, as Schiff told The Chronicle at the time.

Pelosi chose Schiff as the lead manager for the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump and as a member of the commission investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

Click here to read the full article at the SF Chronicle

SF Supervisor Says City’s $1.45B Budget Plan to End Homelessness Won’t Work

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman did not mince words during a sit-down interview with ABC7 News on Wednesday, talking about the city’s housing plan for the homeless.

Earlier in the week, Mandelman called on the Board of Supervisors to have a special meeting to discuss the report issued at the end of last year by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

“We spend a huge amount of money in this city, not solving this problem,” Mandelman said.

The report was meant to be a direct plan of execution after the Board of Supervisors voted in June of 2022 to have the city offer all homeless people in the city a safe place to sleep.

RELATED: SF supervisors vote to create plan offering housing to every homeless person in city

It suggests spending nearly $1.5 billion over the next three years in addition to the money already expected to be spent.

That comes out to about $70,000 per shelter bed per year, according to Mandelman.

“That just seems like way too much to me. It’s more than other communities spend on shelter,” said Mandelman.

Mandelman thinks some of what’s proposed is wasteful and says the city can get rid of encampments for less.

MORE: Homelessness count rises in California despite staying steady nationwide, report finds

And Mandelman certainly isn’t alone. He tells me that quality of life issues such as homelessness are a top concern for both city residents and businesses.

Randy Shaw is the director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic.

He says he agrees with many of Mandelman’s thoughts and believes the city should cut down on the red tape surrounding the issue.

MORE: SF closes Tenderloin Center. What’s next for 400+ people who received services everyday?

“We have an emergency situation. We don’t have the luxury to say, ‘Well this luxury over 10 years will be a better investment’. We got to get people housed now,” said Shaw.

Mandelman maintains that the city can end unsheltered homelessness on our streets with the right plan and funding.

Click here to read the full article at ABC News

$5 Million for Each Longtime Black Resident? S.F. Has a Bold Reparations Plan to Consider

A century after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and lamented how “the Negro still is not free.”

“One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,” he said during his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

King could have been describing today’s San Francisco, a 47-square-mile city that’s home to more than 60 billionaires and at least 7,000 homeless people, around 40% of whom are Black, despite Black people representing only 5% of the population.

Right up until he was assassinated in 1968, King argued that economic justice was integral to racial justice. The idea is at the core of a draft proposal the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee presented to city leaders last month.

The Board of Supervisors created the committee, also called AARAC, in December 2020, amid a national racial reckoning. The board’s legislation, while innovative, was also narrow, allowing city leaders to reject or outright ignore the committee’s work.

What happens next will show whether San Francisco politicians are serious about confronting the city’s checkered past, or are simply pretending to be.

While California was never officially a slave state, slaveholders were protected here, and the committee’s research reveals that segregation, systemic oppression and racial prejudice born from the institution of slavery had a profound impact on the city’s evolution.

In the 20th century alone, San Francisco was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold, barred Black people from settling in certain areas, kept them out of city jobs and demolished the Fillmore, a Black neighborhood and commercial district, leaving it vacant for decades.

“Centuries of harm and destruction of Black lives, Black bodies and Black communities should be met with centuries of repair,” AARAC chair Eric McDonnell told me. “If you look at San Francisco, it’s very much a tale of two cities.”

AARAC’s draft proposal includes a number of financial recommendations. There’s one that will especially get folks talking.

AARAC calls for one-time, lump-sum reparations payments of $5 million to each eligible recipient. The amount could cover the “the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy,” the draft states.

To qualify for the payments, residents must be 18 at the time the committee’s proposal is enacted, and have identified as Black or African American on public documents for at least 10 years. They may also have to prove they were born in the city between 1940 and 1996, have resided in San Francisco for at least 13 years, and be someone, or the direct descendant of someone, incarcerated during the war on drugs.

To put that in perspective, the state reparations task force, which will issue its own proposal is June, believes that Black Californians may be due $569 billion for housing discrimination alone between 1933 and 1977.

The wealth disparity is not the result of bad fortune. The period of urban renewal that began in the 1950s remains one of the most damning examples of how local government stole wealth from Black communities by razing them, and then ensured they never recovered. As AARAC’s report highlights, most of San Francisco’s formerly redlined neighborhoods — where residents were deemed ineligible for federal housing loans between 1933 and 1954 — are low-income neighborhoods undergoing gentrification now.

While San Francisco isn’t unique in having systematically distributed its riches along racial lines, the city’s status as a liberal bastion makes it a powerful testing ground for undoing these damages, AARAC vice chair Tinisch Hollins told me.

“This reparations process gives us a chance to look at the many ways, not just economically, that harm can and should be repaired,” Hollins said. “And even though San Francisco has passed policies that touch on the legacy of slavery, we have needed something that goes toward quantifying that harm.”

As for next steps, the committee will submit its final proposal to city leaders in June. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin told me he hopes his colleagues will approve AARAC’s recommendations.

“There are so many efforts that result in incredible reports that just end up gathering dust on a shelf,” Peskin said. “We cannot let this be one of them.”

As King described in his “I Have a Dream” speech, America was founded by white men who wrote a fraudulent “check” that promised that all men would enjoy the “unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Click here to read the full article in the SF Chronicle