I’M BIG……I’M BAD……..I’M A BID!!

by Quiver Watts

Patrolling and controlling our public spaces— sidewalks, streets and parks— Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are privatizing our downtowns and main thoroughfares. Our public spaces are becoming corridors and shopping centers that are welcoming consumers with open arms and excluding everyone else. Most particularly impacted by this emerging trend are the houseless communities, who are seeing these areas to rest and sleep, free from harassment and criminalization, shrink.  

BIDs have been growing significantly across the United States.

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SMASH THE GULAGS: IT’S STILL GOING DOWN!

by Bilal Ali

NATIONAL PRISON STRIKE

On august 25th, the Bay Area witnessed an outpouring of more than 300 people mobilizing for a call to action at an entrance point of the San Quentin State Prison.  The Mobilization and Call To Action was organized by the Bay Area National Prisoner Strike Solidarity Committee, a regional network of organizations that includes POOR Magazine/Poor People’s Revolutionary Radio, the Anti-Police Terror Project, Worker’s World Party, California Prison Focus, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (Oakland),

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Housing First: It Just Makes Sense

by Zack Lenox

Cities across the United States have tested the housing first model and found that it works very well, presenting a compelling case that housing first should be expanded where it is already used on a small scale and implemented where it is not public policy.

Despite the immediate costs and political resistance with building housing for chronically homeless people, the shift to putting homeless people in permanent, personalized shelter is justified on a range of grounds.

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STRIKE! Incarcerated Workers Demand End to Prison Slavery

by Prison Strike Media Team

This is a growing movement and the Nationwide Prison Strike of 2018 is an unparalleled success for prisoner organizing in the modern era. However, it is important that in recognizing that success that we not lose sight of the demands that prisoners have laid out. Each of them is crucial. As the continued prisoner-on-prisoner violence within prisons over the past week suggests, the people who run the US prison system have not yet made the necessary changes to stop the violence they produce behind the walls.

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Safer Inside: A Community Demonstration

by Jack Rice

It would be easy to miss, with Prop C in full swing, with political candidates talking about their “solutions to the biggest challenges facing the city today”, with successive mayors intensifying the criminalizing sweeps of our friends and family on the streets… But San Francisco is making radical steps – leading the country, in fact – with the first ever demonstration model of a safe injection site in the United States.

“Safer Inside: A Community Demonstration” took place in the last week of August,

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What It Really Is About

by Vivian Imperiale

I couldn’t take it anymore

Walking by sad, homeless people,

barely looking at them

as I passed them by.

I wanted to be better than that

so I decided on a simple outreach plan:

I would give them granola bars.

Using my instincts,

I chose the people to approach.

I thought my gift to them was the granola bar,

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No Help Here: Homeless Seniors in Sonoma County

by Brie Franta

The oldest homeless person I’ve known was in her early to mid 80s.  Netta lost her house to foreclosure and had no family. She had nowhere to go so she continued living in her foreclosed home until the sheriff sent an ambulance to take her away. She was frail but not particularly sick or disabled.  The hospital admitted her but she didn’t need hospital care and, without a disabling illness, the hospital couldn’t send her to a skilled nursing home.

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Human Rights Abuses in Wake of Sonoma County Fires

by Ben Sheiner

When I first arrived in Sonoma County as a new student at Sonoma State University I was greeted with a few lovely towns with nice people who are overly friendly. Coming from San Francisco this was a shock. But I noticed something strange… The homeless community is constantly pushed around and hidden from the greater population to preserve this fantasy world of a lovely nice perfect place to live.

In October 2017 a multitude of fires hit Sonoma County hard.

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The Emperor of San Francisco

by Ian Bertrando

San Francisco has a long illustrious list of quirky residents who have called this city home throughout the years. Reigning at the top of this list of peculiarity would be none other than the late and great Emperor Norton, whose bicentennial birthday was recently celebrated this year. Norton was an eccentric fellow who may be credited with giving this city its characteristic embrace of the unconventional, always looking towards the horizon for progress and providing a place to call home for those that would be shunned elsewhere.

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Facts about Business Improvement Districts

by Quiver Watts

What is a BID?

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are areas of cities where property owners have voted to take over the roles of security, marketing, and management usually performed by local governments. Once created the city itself is responsible for collecting property assessments from the business in the district, and then turning that money back over to a BID board composed of property/business owners voted in by other property owners in the district.

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