At a recent December community meeting hosted by District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood, the shouting from the audience began before Supervisor Ronen was able to begin her opening remarks. The angry outbursts continued to interrupt the 90 minute meeting, which included comments from the heads of SF’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, Municipal Transportation Agency, and Bayview Station police.

‘Let them go to Pacific Heights!,’ one angry neighborhood resident yelled.

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“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

The opening line from Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” has become a well-worn intro that journalists and pundits use for year-end retrospectives. Developments in how San Francisco approaches homelessness in 2018 make the Dickensian reference an apt descriptor.

Readers of Street Sheet and followers of homeless policy can point to two events supporting this binary: The sweeps of homeless encampments and the passage of Proposition C.

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Originally published in 48Hills

Shortened for print in the Street Sheet. Read the full version online here. 

This was to be a banner year for San Francisco Yimbys at the polls. The group is the social-media focused, bright young face of the pro-development lobby. At the start of 2018, they were poised to both define the political agenda of the coming campaign and field a slate of candidates for supervisor that would place them and their allies in complete command of City Hall in San Francisco.

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If nothing is more American than squeaky-tight concentrations of wealth and opportunity, then hip-hop is a uniquely American art form. Rappers in the vast middle of the country have a stingy support system and are less likely to gain traction, but OMB Peezy, a 21-year-old rapper who splits his time between Mobile, Alabama and the Bay Area, has had a momentous 2018 — no thanks to his obscure, unhelpful ZIP code and the skeletally hobbled infrastructure therein.

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Originally published in the LA Times

Los Angeles homelessness has increased significantly over the last several years. (Maria Alejandra Cardona / Los Angeles Times)

Two men who slept on downtown Los Angeles sidewalks were beaten to death with a bat last month. In Santa Monica, four other men were attacked while sleeping outside, allegedly by the same assailant, two fatally. In Mission Hills, in the north San Fernando Valley,

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originally published in the Street Spirit

Robin Silver first noticed the smoke from the Camp Fire early on Friday, November 9—the morning after the blaze broke out in Butte County. “I have asthma. I’ve had to use my inhalers twice as much as normal” said Silver, who has lived at First They Came For The Homeless—the homeless encampment on Adeline Street—since January.

But Friday morning was just the beginning of the smoke that settled over the Bay Area in late November,

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All of us as San Franciscans have witnessed people in severe psychiatric crisis on our streets.  For most of us, it just feels wrong, and we wonder if that is really necessary. It is not, and there are true solutions to the crisis. One intervention being considered is SB 1045.  Senator Scott Wiener, with support from Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Rafael Mandelman passed a law in Sacramento that is a five-year, three-county pilot that would add a new form of detaining people with mental illnesses and removing their civil liberties.  

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After months of hard work, and with the support of countless people, we in San Francisco were able to pass Proposition C, a measure that will double funding for homeless folks and bring us closer to ending the crisis of homelessness in our city. But another initiative that San Franciscans fought hard for was Prop. 10, a statewide rent-control ballot measure that, if passed, would have repealed the Costa-Hawkins Act, allowing cities to impose their own rent control measures.  

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