People gather to admire San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge on August 7.
(Michael Ho Wai Lee/SOPA Images/Shutterstock via CNN)

By Laura Kiniry | CNN

San Francisco is undeniably having a moment.

Over the past year, headlines claiming the city is caught in a spiraling “doom loop” have become so prominent that a city commissioner decided to cash in on downtown San Francisco’s storefront vacancies, homelessness and opioid issues by anonymously advertising an hour-and-a-half long tour showcasing “doom and squalor.” For $30 a person, you could see the city’s “open-air drug markets” and “abandoned tech offices” first-hand.

However, just before it was scheduled to take place, the tour was canceled (and the commissioner ultimately resigned). Instead a more “positive” walk organized by a local nonprofit guided participants through the city’s Tenderloin, highlighting a neighborhood that’s long been a poster child for the city’s hardships.

While people sleeping on sidewalks and drug use were still visible, it focused on the community’s more positive attributes, including a rich history, art and a career center that’s working to get struggling San Franciscans back on their feet.

Still, for many would-be visitors, it’s San Francisco’s more discernible difficulties that are the real deterrents.

“My clients who’ve recently been to San Francisco have never said they felt unsafe,” says Alana Scalise Livingston, owner of Wander Spokane tours in Spokane, Washington (and a former San Francisco resident). “They just say it’s not as nice as it used to be, and there are many homeless people flooding the streets.”

Joshua Hirsch, owner of Sidewalk Food Tours SF, has received much of the same feedback. “According to our tour participants, the homeless people in cities like San Francisco and New York seemed to have become more brazen and outspoken since the pandemic,” he says. “They think it’s their neighborhood, and you don’t even have the right to be walking on the sidewalk.”

Additionally, there’s the city’s so-called “death spiral” or “doom loop” touted by news outlets (including the city’s own) – in which remote work leads to empty real estate, resulting in less foot traffic and then shuttered restaurants and reduced public services. This in turn leads to more overt drug activity as well as unhoused individuals congregating in front of unoccupied spaces.

It’s not that the tales of downtown retail stores closing in bulk and vacant office buildings are untrue, nor are the stories of drugstore chains such as Walgreens locking up most everything in the store behind see-through cabinets, though the latter is occurring in other big cities nationwide.

San Francisco has also been experiencing a rash of car break-ins, including this SF Whole Foods garage break-in video that went viral in Indonesia, that many fear could have long-lasting effects on the city’s tourism.

This past June, the investment firm behind the Hilton San Francisco Union Square (at 1,921 rooms, it’s the city’s largest hotel) and the nearby Parc 55 hotels announced that it is stopping payments on a $725 million loan and surrendering the remaining debt to its lender. Tech companies such as Red Hat and the SF Bay Area’s own Meta have decided to cancel their 2024 conferences in San Francisco as well, citing ongoing concerns over safety and the cleanliness of downtown streets.

‘It felt vibrant and alive’

People eat in San Francisco’s Japantown neighborhood on August 7.(Michael Ho Wai Lee/SOPA Images/Shutterstock via CNN) 

It seems like everywhere you turn, the news about San Francisco just keeps getting worse. Or is it just the news we’re reading?

“We definitely feel like there is a significant misconception of what is really happening on the ground,” says Dina Belon, chief operating officer at Staypineapple Hotels, which has a property in San Francisco’s Union Square district.

Yuki Hayashi, a Toronto-based marketing writer and editor who visited San Francisco in late July for the city’s annual marathon, agrees. “Based on what we saw on Reddit, my family and I thought the city had turned into some post-apocalyptic hell zone,” she says. “But instead it felt vibrant and alive.”

The San Francisco hoteliers and restaurateurs interviewed for this article acknowledge that a drop in the city’s tourism this summer has been evident. That’s the result of a combination of factors, they say. They include the negative headlines and fewer full-time office workers, “which has significantly reduced our business and corporate travel,” says Belon. There’s also the absence of Chinese tourists — which pre-pandemic was one of the city’s top international markets — because of Covid and flight restrictions.

But they also agree that many of the gloomy headlines have been misleading.

“Yes, there are parts of San Francisco that need work,” says Marc Zimmerman, owner and executive chef at Gozu, a modern Japanese eatery located in the city’s East Cut neighborhood. “I don’t think we should pretend that the city doesn’t have issues. But the whole idea that, you know, everybody’s just laying around every SF street with needles hanging out of their arms is definitely a stretch.”

Ben Parks, board chair for San Francisco City Guides, feels similarly.

“It’s like, if the negative media coverage is all you pay attention to,” he says, “you just really miss out on everything the city has to offer.”

His all-volunteer organization has been leading free walking tours citywide for nearly five decades and currently has 79 offerings. Parks says that these days, their attendance has actually been increasing, with what the organization suspects are more local residents interested in learning about the city’s neighborhoods, which in many cases are where San Francisco continues to impress.

“There are so many good things happening in many of our neighborhoods and communities,” Grace Horikiri, executive director of San Francisco’s Japantown Community Benefit District, “and it often gets overshadowed by all the non-positive news.”

Within the past year, Japantown has welcomed new restaurants such as Copra and Fermentation Lab, saw the opening of the Kimpton Hotel Enso in its former Buchanan Hotel space and watched the growth of its popular monthly Mini Art Market in the community’s Japantown mall.

New businesses, new life

Grammy winning musician Kelly Rowland and Ghirardelli Chocolate Co. CEO Joel Burrows participate in the grand reopening of The Original Ghirardelli Ice Cream & Chocolate Shop at Ghirardelli Square on July 13.(Don Feria/AP) 

The city is also seeing new life in some of its major tourism hubs.

This August, IKEA bucked the trend of major retailers moving out of downtown and opened a San Francisco store focusing on small-space living along Market Street (between Sixth and Fifth streets), while more than 15 local small businesses, including Devil’s Teeth bakery, Holy Stitch! apparel and The Mellow, are setting up pop-up shops in vacant downtown storefronts, beginning mid-September.

Over in Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco’s iconic Ghirardelli Chocolate Company hosted the grand reopening of its Original Ice Cream and Chocolate Shop in July after a six-month renovation. The city’s LUMA hotel, which opened in 2022 adjacent to the city’s Chase Center sports and entertainment area, even won Tripadvisor’s 2023 Travelers’ Choice Best of the Best award, despite San Francisco’s negative narrative.

Chinatown, a neighborhood especially hard-hit by the pandemic, is hosting a series of new festivals, including a Halloween Festival on October 28. In January, the community also saw the long-awaited opening of its Rose Pak Muni metro station, providing Muni light-rail riders direct access to the heart of Chinatown’s streets.

Whether it’s Golden Gate Park’s 1.5-mile stretch known as JFK Promenade, with its Adirondack chairs; street art and playable pianos, which became permanently vehicle-free during the pandemic; or city stalwarts such as Amoeba Records in the Haight-Ashbury (which Santa Cruz bookseller Liz Pollock says is still filled with people “flipping through LPs” every time she visits), the city is in many ways just going about its business.

‘We needed a kick, and we got it’

To help curb auto break-ins, the San Francisco Police Department is beginning to deploy bait cars, notably in high tourist areas such Alamo Square, pictured here on August 9.(Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) 

Homelessness has been an ongoing issue in San Francisco, with thousands of homeless people sleeping on the streets on any given night, and the effects of the pandemic have brought it even more to the city’s forefront. “The challenges that San Francisco has always had are just more visible,” says Belon.

However, when it comes to violent crimes in US cities, San Francisco’s numbers are comparatively low. Larceny, such as car thefts and break-ins, is what really drives up crimes figures in the city and at the same time drives away visitors.

“We can’t just act like nothing is wrong,” says Zimmerman, “but for whatever reason, that’s the direction we went. But I feel like we needed a kick, and we got it. This is a great and resilient city, and now we’re seeing a big push to bring it all back.”

To help curb auto break-ins, the San Francisco Police Department is beginning to deploy bait cars that can help identity and arrest thieves, notably in tourist areas such as the Palace of Fine Arts, Alamo Square and Fisherman’s Wharf.

Getting homeless people off the streets and into places where they can get viable help (mental and physical) isn’t so easy, but that’s not to say efforts aren’t being made. In December 2022, a federal judge effectively barred the city from breaking up or sweeping tent encampments until there are more shelter beds than individuals, but the issue isn’t so cut and dry.

While the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team works collaboratively with the Department of Public Health’s Street Medicine team to address the medical and behavioral health needs of many of the city’s homeless residents and also to offer them volunteer overnight shelter, many would rather stay on the streets for reasons such as feeling unsafe in shelter and the inability to keep their belongings with them.

Still, says Zimmerman, “It’s a different experience for those of us who walk around San Francisco every day. Yes, there are parts of the city that need work. But just in the neighborhood of Gozu, you’ve got Salesforce Park that is beautiful. The ballpark is beautiful. This is the perfect opportunistic position for San Francisco to bounce back.”

While raising capital for his newest venture, Yokai, a new hi-fi listening bar with cocktails and food that’s scheduled to open just a short walk from Gozu in mid-September, Zimmerman first heard a term that he’s since adopted as his own: “SF long,” which investors and other long-term San Francisco residents have been using to show their commitment to the city.

“It means, ‘we’re weathering this out together, and we’re not going anywhere. We’re in it for the long haul,’ ” Zimmerman said.

For all of San Francisco’s perceived and more evident troubles, the city still has a lot going for it.

“We have the geography,” says Zimmerman, “the location — with both Napa and Sonoma both an hour north — the restaurant scene, some great museums, and this awesome cultural melting pot of people. The whole thing is very unique.” 

Others such as Belon, Pollock and Livingston feel the same. “It’s the whole experience of it,” says Pollock, “and you can’t find it anywhere except San Francisco.”

Laura Kiniry is a freelance journalist and 28-year resident of San Francisco. She lives in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

The-CNN-Wire
& © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

The post The difficult reality about San Francisco – The Mercury Information appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

(CNN) — San Francisco is undeniably having a moment.

Over the past year, headlines claiming the city is caught in a spiraling “doom loop” have become so prominent that a city commissioner decided to cash in on downtown San Francisco’s storefront vacancies, homelessness and opioid issues by anonymously advertising an hour-and-a-half long tour showcasing “doom and squalor.” For $30 a person, you could see the city’s “open-air drug markets” and “abandoned tech offices” first-hand.

However, just before it was scheduled to take place, the tour was canceled (and the commissioner ultimately resigned). Instead a more “positive” walk organized by a local nonprofit guided participants through the city’s Tenderloin, highlighting a neighborhood that’s long been a poster child for the city’s hardships.

While people sleeping on sidewalks and drug use were still visible, it focused on the community’s more positive attributes, including a rich history, art and a career center that’s working to get struggling San Franciscans back on their feet.

Still, for many would-be visitors, it’s San Francisco’s more discernible difficulties that are the real deterrents.

“My clients who’ve recently been to San Francisco have never said they felt unsafe,” says Alana Scalise Livingston, owner of Wander Spokane tours in Spokane, Washington (and a former San Francisco resident). “They just say it’s not as nice as it used to be, and there are many homeless people flooding the streets.”

Joshua Hirsch, owner of Sidewalk Food Tours SF, has received much of the same feedback. “According to our tour participants, the homeless people in cities like San Francisco and New York seemed to have become more brazen and outspoken since the pandemic,” he says. “They think it’s their neighborhood, and you don’t even have the right to be walking on the sidewalk.”

Additionally, there’s the city’s so-called “death spiral” or “doom loop” touted by news outlets (including the city’s own) – in which remote work leads to empty real estate, resulting in less foot traffic and then shuttered restaurants and reduced public services. This in turn leads to more overt drug activity as well as unhoused individuals congregating in front of unoccupied spaces.

It’s not that the tales of downtown retail stores closing in bulk and vacant office buildings are untrue, nor are the stories of drugstore chains such as Walgreens locking up most everything in the store behind see-through cabinets, though the latter is occurring in other big cities nationwide.

San Francisco has also been experiencing a rash of car break-ins, including this SF Whole Foods garage break-in video that went viral in Indonesia, that many fear could have long-lasting effects on the city’s tourism.

This past June, the investment firm behind the Hilton San Francisco Union Square (at 1,921 rooms, it’s the city’s largest hotel) and the nearby Parc 55 hotels announced that it is stopping payments on a $725 million loan and surrendering the remaining debt to its lender. Tech companies such as Red Hat and the SF Bay Area’s own Meta have decided to cancel their 2024 conferences in San Francisco as well, citing ongoing concerns over safety and the cleanliness of downtown streets.

‘It felt vibrant and alive’

It seems like everywhere you turn, the news about San Francisco just keeps getting worse. Or is it just the news we’re reading?

“We definitely feel like there is a significant misconception of what is really happening on the ground,” says Dina Belon, chief operating officer at Staypineapple Hotels, which has a property in San Francisco’s Union Square district.

Yuki Hayashi, a Toronto-based marketing writer and editor who visited San Francisco in late July for the city’s annual marathon, agrees. “Based on what we saw on Reddit, my family and I thought the city had turned into some post-apocalyptic hell zone,” she says. “But instead it felt vibrant and alive.”

The San Francisco hoteliers and restaurateurs interviewed for this article acknowledge that a drop in the city’s tourism this summer has been evident. That’s the result of a combination of factors, they say. They include the negative headlines and fewer full-time office workers, “which has significantly reduced our business and corporate travel,” says Belon. There’s also the absence of Chinese tourists — which pre-pandemic was one of the city’s top international markets — because of Covid and flight restrictions.

But they also agree that many of the gloomy headlines have been misleading.

“Yes, there are parts of San Francisco that need work,” says Marc Zimmerman, owner and executive chef at Gozu, a modern Japanese eatery located in the city’s East Cut neighborhood. “I don’t think we should pretend that the city doesn’t have issues. But the whole idea that, you know, everybody’s just laying around every SF street with needles hanging out of their arms is definitely a stretch.”

Ben Parks, board chair for San Francisco City Guides, feels similarly.

“It’s like, if the negative media coverage is all you pay attention to,” he says, “you just really miss out on everything the city has to offer.”

His all-volunteer organization has been leading free walking tours citywide for nearly five decades and currently has 79 offerings. Parks says that these days, their attendance has actually been increasing, with what the organization suspects are more local residents interested in learning about the city’s neighborhoods, which in many cases are where San Francisco continues to impress.

“There are so many good things happening in many of our neighborhoods and communities,” Grace Horikiri, executive director of San Francisco’s Japantown Community Benefit District, “and it often gets overshadowed by all the non-positive news.”

Within the past year, Japantown has welcomed new restaurants such as Copra and Fermentation Lab, saw the opening of the Kimpton Hotel Enso in its former Buchanan Hotel space and watched the growth of its popular monthly Mini Art Market in the community’s Japantown mall.

New businesses, new life

The city is also seeing new life in some of its major tourism hubs.

This August, IKEA bucked the trend of major retailers moving out of downtown and opened a San Francisco store focusing on small-space living along Market Street (between Sixth and Fifth streets), while more than 15 local small businesses, including Devil’s Teeth bakery, Holy Stitch! apparel and The Mellow, are setting up pop-up shops in vacant downtown storefronts, beginning mid-September.

Over in Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco’s iconic Ghirardelli Chocolate Company hosted the grand reopening of its Original Ice Cream and Chocolate Shop in July after a six-month renovation. The city’s LUMA hotel, which opened in 2022 adjacent to the city’s Chase Center sports and entertainment area, even won Tripadvisor’s 2023 Travelers’ Choice Best of the Best award, despite San Francisco’s negative narrative.

Chinatown, a neighborhood especially hard-hit by the pandemic, is hosting a series of new festivals, including a Halloween Festival on October 28. In January, the community also saw the long-awaited opening of its Rose Pak Muni metro station, providing Muni light-rail riders direct access to the heart of Chinatown’s streets.

Whether it’s Golden Gate Park’s 1.5-mile stretch known as JFK Promenade, with its Adirondack chairs; street art and playable pianos, which became permanently vehicle-free during the pandemic; or city stalwarts such as Amoeba Records in the Haight-Ashbury (which Santa Cruz bookseller Liz Pollock says is still filled with people “flipping through LPs” every time she visits), the city is in many ways just going about its business.

‘We needed a kick, and we got it’

Homelessness has been an ongoing issue in San Francisco, with thousands of homeless people sleeping on the streets on any given night, and the effects of the pandemic have brought it even more to the city’s forefront. “The challenges that San Francisco has always had are just more visible,” says Belon.

However, when it comes to violent crimes in US cities, San Francisco’s numbers are comparatively low. Larceny, such as car thefts and break-ins, is what really drives up crimes figures in the city and at the same time drives away visitors.

“We can’t just act like nothing is wrong,” says Zimmerman, “but for whatever reason, that’s the direction we went. But I feel like we needed a kick, and we got it. This is a great and resilient city, and now we’re seeing a big push to bring it all back.”

To help curb auto break-ins, the San Francisco Police Department is beginning to deploy bait cars that can help identity and arrest thieves, notably in tourist areas such as the Palace of Fine Arts, Alamo Square and Fisherman’s Wharf.

Getting homeless people off the streets and into places where they can get viable help (mental and physical) isn’t so easy, but that’s not to say efforts aren’t being made. In December 2022, a federal judge effectively barred the city from breaking up or sweeping tent encampments until there are more shelter beds than individuals, but the issue isn’t so cut and dry.

While the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team works collaboratively with the Department of Public Health’s Street Medicine team to address the medical and behavioral health needs of many of the city’s homeless residents and also to offer them volunteer overnight shelter, many would rather stay on the streets for reasons such as feeling unsafe in shelter and the inability to keep their belongings with them.

Still, says Zimmerman, “It’s a different experience for those of us who walk around San Francisco every day. Yes, there are parts of the city that need work. But just in the neighborhood of Gozu, you’ve got Salesforce Park that is beautiful. The ballpark is beautiful. This is the perfect opportunistic position for San Francisco to bounce back.”

While raising capital for his newest venture, Yokai, a new hi-fi listening bar with cocktails and food that’s scheduled to open just a short walk from Gozu in mid-September, Zimmerman first heard a term that he’s since adopted as his own: “SF long,” which investors and other long-term San Francisco residents have been using to show their commitment to the city.

“It means, ‘we’re weathering this out together, and we’re not going anywhere. We’re in it for the long haul,’ ” Zimmerman said.

For all of San Francisco’s perceived and more evident troubles, the city still has a lot going for it.

“We have the geography,” says Zimmerman, “the location — with both Napa and Sonoma both an hour north — the restaurant scene, some great museums, and this awesome cultural melting pot of people. The whole thing is very unique.” 

Others such as Belon, Pollock and Livingston feel the same. “It’s the whole experience of it,” says Pollock, “and you can’t find it anywhere except San Francisco.”

Laura Kiniry is a freelance journalist and 28-year resident of San Francisco. She lives in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

The-CNN-Wire

& © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

The post The difficult fact about San Francisco | Options appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Old fashioned irrigation systems were quite thorough, and technically sustainable. They broadcast generous volumes of water over any vegetation that required it. Their systems were too simple to need much adjustment. Their metallic composition was very resilient. That is why so many old systems were in service for so long. Some continue to function.

However, such old fashioned irrigation systems were not perfect. Their consumption was not as sustainable as their plumbing. They wasted water on vegetation that needed less, and pavement. Some of the broadcast water evaporated before reaching any vegetation. Without automation, old irrigation systems operated when convenient for their operators.

Modern irrigation systems are typically more efficient. Automation allows them to operate prior to sunrise to limit evaporation. Most modern systems apply water directly to the soil. This leaves no irrigation water to evaporate from foliar or other surfaces. Also, it prevents evaporation from airborne broadcast irrigation water. Evaporation innately wastes water.

Newer is not necessarily better.

Of course, modern irrigation systems are no more perfect than old systems. Groundcover and lawns still rely on broadcast irrigation. Such systems still waste water on pavement. Automation can actually waste water if not adjusted manually for rain and other weather. Only the most modern automation adapts to weather. No system responds to vegetation.

Consequently, irrigation can become either deficient or excessive as vegetation matures. Many native species need regular irrigation only as they disperse roots after installation. They are likely to rot with the same irrigation as they mature. Many tropical species need more water as they grow. Some vegetation, as it grows, can obstruct broadcast irrigation.

The complexity of modern irrigation systems complicates their maintenance. Automation is merely one component of the infrastructure. Emitters of drip irrigation sometimes need relocation or replacement. They are sometimes difficult to find below healthy vegetation. Because components are plastic, they are not as durable as old fashioned components.

Highlight: Gaura

Although not native, gaura, Oenothera lindheimeri, can almost naturalize as if it were. All it needs is occasional watering through summer. It performs better with regular watering. Individual specimens live for only about four years. Some may last for only a single year. However, their abundant progeny are likely to replace and perhaps overwhelm them first.

Gaura prefers sunny and warm exposure. Shade causes sloppy form. Naturalized gaura has potential to become weedy or invade other vegetation. Seedlings relocate efficiently. Cutting back old growth as it deteriorates through winter promotes vibrant spring growth. Concurrent removal of the shabbiest old specimens favors vigorous younger specimens.

Collective growth is mostly less than five feet deep, with wispy and lightly foliated stems. Basal leaves are bigger than tiny upper leaves. Airy flowers are only about an inch wide. Floral color is mostly pale pink. Seedlings of cultivars with white or richer pink bloom are not necessarily true to type. Neither are seedlings of cultivars with richly bronzed foliage. Bloom continues from very early spring until cooler wintry weather.

Tony Tomeo can be contacted at tonytomeo.com .

The post Irrigation Expertise Can Get Difficult appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

1313 L St. in Washington, D.C., was formerly an office building. By the end of this year, it will be home to newly finished apartments.

Richard Morrison, Erin Kenney/NPR

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Richard Morrison, Erin Kenney/NPR

1313 L St. in Washington, D.C., was formerly an office building. By the end of this year, it will be home to newly finished apartments.

Richard Morrison, Erin Kenney/NPR

If you walked past 1313 L St. in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, you would’ve seen a 1980s-style office building. The headquarters for the National Association for the Education of Young Children was red brick, with big windows and the organization’s logo plastered across the side.

But if you walk by the same spot this time next year, you could be looking at a newly finished apartment building with sleek gray siding and a rooftop patio.

The project is one example of a growing real estate trend — converting old, unused office space into apartments. These conversions seem like a win-win: turning a plethora of barely used office space into desperately needed urban housing.

But converting offices into apartments is easier said than done. And while it’s easy to imagine the process behind conversions, like adding in walls and plumbing, it gets complicated.

Out-of-the-way and older office buildings are targets for conversions to apartments

City centers are struggling to fill the gap left by commuters who now come into the office a few days a week, if at all. These workers were patrons of downtown businesses, from restaurants to dry cleaners. Without them, offices are desolate and businesses are shuttering.

To save these downtowns, cities are trying to turn unused office space into housing. San Francisco officials are making efforts to adjust current building codes and get rid of extra fees for office-to-residential projects. In Washington, D.C., the mayor wants to put more money into a tax relief program for office conversions.

Even cities like New York, where many companies have offices, vacancy is becoming a problem. Office vacancy in Manhattan was 15% in May, according to real estate investment firm CBRE.

“The commute has crushed a lot of people’s willingness to trudge into the office every day,” said Jason Alderman, the head of real estate giant Hines’ New York office. He said Hines’ buildings within a half-mile of the major transit hubs Grand Central and Penn Station have higher occupancy rates than others.

But, he added, “buildings that are catering to people — making it exciting to come back to the office or easy to come back to the office — are winning.”

As demand for other office buildings decreases, Hines is considering office-to-apartment conversion projects. Alderman said the company is actively bidding on properties.

Too many rules, not enough incentives

Converting an office building into a residential space can be difficult, and that’s when the building already has the right structure to work with. A lot of buildings don’t — they’re too wide, or have the wrong kind of windows, which makes conversion more expensive. But politics may be a greater factor in a project’s success.

Even as cities try to entice developers to turn office buildings into apartments, they’ve also put up obstacles. In New York, strict zoning rules already impact which buildings — and in some cases, how many floors — can be converted into housing. Rezoning a property for residential use can be timely and costly. Alderman said approval also requires support from politicians, who often add requirements for affordable housing a developer may be unable to afford.

Right now, many developers in New York are adjusting after the expiration of a state tax exemption for builders who include affordable housing in their projects. The exemption played a large role in multifamily housing construction in the city. According to a study from NYU’s Furman Center, 70% of multifamily properties built from 2010-2020 took advantage of the tax exemption.

Alderman said, while he hopes it is reinstated, “That would be both [the city and the state] cooperating together and waving a magic wand. And I’m not holding my breath that that’s going to happen anytime soon.”

The 1313 L St. building, pictured here in December 2021, is being converted into apartments by architecture firm Hickok Cole.

Richard Morrison

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Richard Morrison

The 1313 L St. building, pictured here in December 2021, is being converted into apartments by architecture firm Hickok Cole.

Richard Morrison

In Washington, D.C., the government has exempted downtown projects from affordable housing requirements to encourage developments like the 1313 L St. building, which is being converted by architecture firm Hickok Cole.

“The economics of these projects, they’re not slam dunks,” said Guilherme Almeida, the firm’s director of high performance design. “They actually are pretty complex and expensive projects to execute, so [an affordable-housing requirement] would have disincentivized the creation of more housing downtown.”

Turning offices into homes would be better for the environment than starting from scratch

Building construction produces 11% of global carbon emissions, according to the World Green Building Council. It can take up to 80 years for a new, energy-efficient building to offset its own carbon emissions, according to a study by the National Historic Preservation Fund’s Preservation Green Lab. The fund’s former sustainability director, Patrice Frey, said reusing an existing building can reduce emissions dramatically.

“I don’t think we can think of our resources as so expendable that we can just continue to build and abandon or build and demolish,” Frey said. “We’ve really got to think more sustainably about using what we’ve got.”

She said one reason behind the commercial real estate and housing crises is that over the last few decades, developers built with one use in mind, whether it be office space or residential. She’s hopeful that in time, the industry will shift to designing buildings that are more adaptable to changing needs.

“That mentality, that thinking about flexible, adaptable space has to be integrated into everything we construct into the future,” Frey said. “Because we’ve got to be designing for centuries, not for decades.”

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On Christmas Eve 2022, Pat Brogan and her husband, Jim Mason, were riding their bicycles near their home in Coronado, a peninsula town on California’s San Diego Bay. Avid sailors, they noticed a striking sailboat anchored in very shallow water next to the municipal golf course.

This was an unusual boat, a very large trimaran, very similar, they thought, to one called Mighty Merloe that for years had been listed for sale for as much as $1.7 million and docked next to their boat on nearby Harbor Island. With a mast 100 feet high, and a width of 60 feet to match its length, this boat stood out in any harbor. The next day they were out for another ride and saw it again tied up at Coronado’s public dock. Curious, they approached.

Now, Brogan was almost sure this was the Mighty Merloe, a high-performance racing trimaran with an impressive pedigree. In her prime, she was one of the fastest boats in the world and had been skippered by some of the world’s best sailors. Her new captain and his wife were aboard and greeted the strangers warmly. They introduced themselves as Donald and Tori Lawson.

“This looks like the Mighty Merloe,” Brogan said, fishing unsuccessfully for an answer. Donald Lawson was otherwise gregarious and happy to give a tour of the boat, now called Defiant. Once below, Brogan spotted the VHF radio labeled with the boat’s former name. She was indeed the Mighty Merloe.

Brogan didn’t press for details about the boat’s provenance as Lawson regaled his guests with his quest to sail Defiant alone around the world in record-setting time, a Herculean feat. He talked about his nonprofit organization, the Dark Seas Project. Lawson told them they were about to set sail for Panama and transit the canal on Jan. 8, on their way to their hometown of Baltimore, where Donald would begin his attempt to sail around the world in what he hoped would be fewer than 70 days. The voyage, planned for the fall, would be one of many records he wanted to break in the years ahead. By the end of the tour, the foursome had become fast friends.

Lawson, 41, got as far south as Acapulco, his last known port. After spending several months there adding and testing equipment and gear, and making repairs, which he recounted in detail on social media, he departed for Panama once again on July 5 — fully into cyclone season, and this time alone. Tori, whose given name is Jacqueline, flew home to Baltimore.

Four days into his journey, Lawson sent a message to his wife, telling her Defiant’s engine had failed. Three days later, he encountered heavy weather and lost use of his wind generator. Soon he had no electrical power. He was almost 300 miles southeast of the southern coast of Mexico, the nearest land. He decided to turn back toward Acapulco, which satellite tracking confirmed on July 13.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed the Mexican Navy had located a capsized trimaran that Tori Lawson identified as Defiant. The Coast Guard dispatched a cutter to assist in the search for Donald Lawson, whose fate is not yet known. He had with him a life raft, survival equipment and ample provisions.

Missing sailors are often never heard from again. Those who are rescued summon help quickly, or find a way to survive for a long time and are eventually found. Apart from miracle rescues, missing sailors generally do not make big news. Mishaps at sea are accepted as the cost of sailing offshore. The recent advances in satellite technology, however, have made rescue more likely. Defiant had satellite communications aboard but apparently lost the ability to keep it powered. The boat also had an emergency beacon, but no signal was transmitted.

The story of Defiant differs from other stories of lost boats, starting with Lawson’s profile in the sailing community. He was an inspiring promoter with a compelling story he was good at telling. He was the subject of many interviews and had a following on social media. One of very few prominent Black sailors, he was the chair of the diversity committee at U.S. Sailing, the governing body of the sport. He evangelized his trailblazing mission to bring more people of color into the sport, still dominated by white men.

His backstory was the basis for the Dark Seas Project and important to its funding, which he had to solicit. Defiant was no ordinary boat. While Lawson’s skills — for that matter, any sailor’s skills — are challenging to measure with precision and unanimity, there is no disagreement that his mile-eating trimaran was a thoroughbred.

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Enormous, complex, expensive to operate, and of an age when sailboats typically need a lot of repair, Defiant would be a challenge for any one person to manage, let alone to sail. About 20 years old, she was an ORMA 60, a class of high-performance racing boats built from 1996 to 2007, akin to Formula One cars.

They were the cutting edge of sailboat design made of very stiff, lightweight carbon fiber. Defiant weighed the same as boats a fraction of her size. She could sail as fast as 40 knots (46 mph), whereas most conventional sailboats would be pressed to reach 8 knots. Defiant was equipped with a square-top mainsail (a shape that makes for a larger, more powerful sail) and three triangular foresails, or jibs, one larger than the next, each one capable of adding speed. A system of hydraulics aided control of her powerful sails and unique pivoting mast, which could be moved into and away from the wind to enhance stability and performance.

“The boat was the best ORMA 60 ever built,” said Artie Means, who served as crew for years aboard Mighty Merloe, “but not designed for the ‘average’ sailor. It was delicate.”

Means was the navigator in 2017 when Mighty Merloe competed in the storied Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu, finishing in a record four days and seven hours with a crew of seven led by renowned French skipper Jacques Vincent. That is a pace of about 500 miles a day.

The French-designed trimaran was launched in 2004 and christened as Groupama 2. She was skippered by another famous French yachtsman, Franck Cammas, who won several races with her. She was later used as a training platform for the America’s Cup team, before being sold to American owner Howard Enloe and being renamed Mighty Merloe.

Stiff and light, aided by foils on each outrigger, Defiant could almost get airborne. At her fastest, Defiant skimmed the surface of the ocean, riding the edge of one of its outriggers. But a sudden gust could cause the boat to go over. Once capsized, trimarans cannot recover.

Although ORMA 60s like Defiant are typically sailed by a large crew, they have crossed oceans steered by one person. The singlehanded, transatlantic Route du Rhum race from France to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean is held every four years at the end of the hurricane season. The 2002 race featured 18 ORMA 60s; only three finished the race, as many either capsized or lost their masts in rough weather. Skippers, drawn to the speed of ORMA 60s, continued to race them even as the design was discontinued, in part because of the fickle nature of the boats.

Scot Tempesta, the editor of a popular sailing blog and YouTube channel, toured Defiant in late 2020 when it was still Mighty Merloe. He found it to be in good condition. In the video, the boat appears to have been well maintained, its surfaces polished and shiny. Sailing lines look new, equipment is neatly stowed, and the mainsail is folded into a pristine sail bag. In one shot, he is surrounded by a spider’s web of ropes, attesting to the complexity of the boat’s rigging system. He points out an escape hatch in the hull, a reminder of the boat’s risk of capsizing.

The last available images of Defiant, some taken by Lawson and posted on sailing blogs and social media, were taken in Acapulco upon its arrival at the end of January and shortly before its departure in July. Defiant had certainly seen some hard ocean miles. One widely circulated image showed extensive damage to the port side outrigger and to its sails. Late in 2022, Defiant apparently drifted into rocks while at anchor off Anacapa Island, one of the Channel Islands off the southern coast of California.

Lawson spent most of the winter and spring in Acapulco tending to the boat, although he spent a few weeks of April in Baltimore. He returned to Acapulco May 1 to continue preparing Defiant. His social media posts go into great detail about upgrades, maintenance, repairs and the gear he added. He wrote extensively about weather and the tools he used to make decisions about his route.

In a short video posted May 23 to his YouTube channel from Acapulco, Lawson obliquely referred to some of his recent mishaps, saying he “hit some debris and damaged some stuff in some storms.” No longer polished and shiny, Defiant was in need of a paint job. The sail bag looked worn. He went on to show viewers a new mooring line, halyards (ropes used to hoist sails), a wind generator, a chartplotter and a glimpse of a weatherworn bag containing a life raft.

As Lawson’s following grew, so did the skepticism expressed in online posts. Indeed, he had set a mighty goal and had been very public about it, opening himself up to criticism.

There is no formal standard to grade or qualify a sailor. Credentials can be earned, but no certifications, licenses or titles are required to sail. The world is full of sailors with no formal training who have safely crossed oceans. The skills needed to race a modern trimaran are not necessarily the skills needed to cruise the Caribbean in an old monohull. Put another way, there are so many skills to master — seamanship, weather, rigging, sail trim, steering, docking, line handling, anchoring, plumbing, engine repair — that it’s possible to be simultaneously an expert in some things and a novice in others.

“He might be a professional sailor, but he’s not a professional racer,” Tempesta said, “and there’s a difference.”

Lawson studied engineering at Morgan State and, according to his LinkedIn profile, also attended the Annapolis School of Seamanship, where he earned a 100-ton captain’s license and a celestial navigation certificate. He said he completed a number of long, offshore passages as crew and captain, including a solo voyage across the Atlantic in a 21-foot sailboat. He has taught sailing extensively, raced, and worked as a delivery captain, transporting yachts for other owners. His sailing resume would be the envy of recreational sailors and many professionals (the definition of which is open to interpretation), but what he was setting out to do verges on superhuman.

The shortest route that qualifies as an official circumnavigation is 21,600 nautical miles (or 24,857 land miles), most of it in the Southern Ocean past Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope, and Cape Leeuwin. Because there is little less land in the Southern Hemisphere, waves and wind in the Southern Ocean are especially big and strong. A solo sailor can never sleep a full night, instead napping for 20 to 30 minutes at a time every few hours over a period of months. According to Yachting World, only about 200 sailors have sailed alone, nonstop around the world, most of them in slow-moving monohulls not in pursuit of speed records that are now within the reach of only modern trimarans.

Means, who raced thousands of miles aboard Mighty Merloe, was unconvinced Lawson had sufficient experience aboard Defiant under the kinds of conditions he would likely encounter sailing nonstop at a record-breaking pace.

“In my opinion Mr. Lawson had zero chance of setting any records himself, and very little chance of even completing a passage on such a complicated yacht with so little training,” said Means, who met Lawson briefly.

Those who know Lawson are unanimous about his passion, determination, and confidence, which often showed itself in his ability to settle and soothe those he sailed with. They also all expressed concern over what he set out to accomplish.

Lawson and Lynn Handy learned to sail together as teenagers at Baltimore’s Downtown Sailing Center, known as one of the most inclusive yacht clubs in the sport. They both went on to become sailing instructors at the center. Handy eventually became its executive director.

“Even when he was young, he had that drive for adventure and risk taking,” Handy said. “That was always in him. He was always looking for the next challenge. He was driven by proving himself. … this was an obvious next step for him.

She paused when asked if she thought he had taken on too much by sailing Defiant.

“This is a hard question to answer,” she said. “I feel like some people are also responsible, not just him, for putting him in the position he’s in now. … What he should have had is a really deep team of really professional people constantly coaching him and working with him.”

To her point, a Formula One driver has a team of mechanics, advisors, and a deep-pocketed owner who can pay for the expenses required to keep a race car in good running order. High-end racing yachts are similar.

Whatever his qualifications, Lawson managed to sail his vessel, a highly complex and temperamental racing machine, from San Diego to San Francisco, then back to San Diego, and on to Acapulco — an impressive accomplishment on its own.

Brogan and Mason brought the Lawsons Christmas dinner the day they met, along with some extra provisions, extra batteries and flashlights. They promised to see each other again. Brogan and Mason invited them to come sailing with them in the Bahamas in the spring. Within a few days, the Lawsons were offshore. They did not reach Acapulco, about 1,800 miles from San Diego, until the end of January. Defiant is capable of covering this distance in less than a week under the right conditions. A conventional sailboat can do it in about two weeks nonstop.

What the Lawsons did in January, where they sailed, what route they took, whether they stopped somewhere, isn’t clear. Donald Lawson’s various social media platforms are empty of any posts during this stretch. Tori Lawson has declined interviews since appearing at a press conference Monday about her husband’s disappearance.

Lawson seemed to be aware of skepticism from his online audience. In a post dated Feb. 5, he wrote:

“Our program is working towards having our vessel, the Defiant, ready for long distance and hard record runs. So I will say openly — expect more damage, more torn sails, more stories about collisions and more sea stories because these things need to happen now so we are prepared for the ultimate challenge.”

Lawson’s friend and colleague Richard Jepsen remained hopeful Lawson would be found alive and safe. He was measured when asked to assess his friend’s abilities and judgement.

“Would you need to have some willful dismissiveness of risk in order to embark on such an incredible project? You’d have to say yes,” said Jepsen, the president of the Board of Directors for U.S. Sailing. “I worried for him, but I loved that there was someone on this planet willing to do something like that.”

hugo.kugiya@thebaltimorebanner.com

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RENO, Nev. (AP) – Water conflicts are nothing new for the arid West, where myriad users have long been vying for their share of the precious resource, from California’s Central Valley to the Colorado and Missouri rivers.

But few have addressed the legal issue at play in rural Nevada: To what extent can residents, farmers, and ranchers claim water that seeps into the ground through the clay bottom of an outdated, unlined irrigation canal?

A federal appeals court recently breathed new life into a legal battle that has involved the US government and the high desert town of Fernley since a 118-year-old sewer burst in 2008, flooding hundreds of homes.

That year, the US Bureau of Reclamation began work on a plan to line portions of the 31-mile (50-kilometer) canal with concrete. The canal diverts water from the Truckee River, which flows out of Lake Tahoe in the Sierra, and directs it to irrigation ditches that support alfalfa farmers and ranchers about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of Reno.

However, farmers and ranchers in and around the town of Fenley said the repairs would prevent leaking water they’ve used to fill their wells east of Reno for a century.

The government says locals have no right to the water, which US taxpayers own. Government experts say the rehabilitation will also help prevent future sewer failures, although they acknowledge it will prevent leaks into the local aquifer used by Fenley residents.

Completed in 1905, the Truckee Canal was the first major irrigation system in the West under the Newlands Reclamation Act signed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902.

The law was named after a Nevada congressman who said the project would “make the desert bloom” and attract settlers to places like Fernley, where annual rainfall averages five inches.

Similar projects followed throughout the arid west – many of them much larger. Construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in Arizona began in 1903 and was dedicated by Roosevelt himself in 1911.

By then, two dozen projects had been approved, including one that dammed the Lower Yellowstone River near its mouth in the Missouri to irrigate farmland in Montana and North Dakota.

In Nevada, Fernley and surrounding agricultural users eventually became “totally dependent” on state-subsidized water supplies, their attorneys say.

Borrowing a sort of finder-keeper doctrine as old as the western expansion, opponents of sewer rehabilitation have argued in state and federal courts that they have a right to water, in part because no one told them before the canal broke that they not allowed to do that.

The bureau, the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District, which operates the canal, and various judges generally agree that the water belongs to US taxpayers.

Fernley is trying to assert a water right that does not exist under state or federal law, irrigation district attorney Benjamin Shawcroft said in recent Nevada Supreme Court filings.

“A related but perhaps unanswerable question is why is the City of Fernley so determined to disrupt a project whose sole purpose is to prevent a canal breach and the flooding of hundreds of homes?” he wrote.

Fernley attorney David Rigdon said the city is not opposed to cheaper alternatives to reduce flood risk while maintaining groundwater recharge.

“What Fernley refuses is a cure worse than the disease,” Rigdon wrote in the court filings. “To fix an issue that was affecting about 500 homes, they implemented a solution that is jeopardizing the primary water supply for all 20,000 city residents.”

“And to make matters worse, they now want the very people they are harming to pay for the cost of building the project,” he wrote.

No one was killed or seriously injured in the 2008 flood, but the Irrigation District agreed to a $18.1 million class action lawsuit in 2016 involving 1,200 people who suffered property damage. Unusual, heavy winter rains put pressure on the canal system, and experts later found it had been weakened by decades of rodent burrowing down the sides.

The legal dispute over the plans for the rehabilitation of the canal followed.

Fernley filed for relief in a state court last year after US District Court Judge Miranda Du dismissed her federal lawsuit alleging that the government failed to adequately address the alternatives required by the National Environmental Policy Act when granting a 148 -Million dollar plan to route 12.7 miles (20 km) of canal approved.

In March, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Du’s ruling, which concluded that the NEPA claims had no legal basis because their interests in the water were economic, not environmental.

However, the San Francisco appeals court also concluded that she erred in refusing to allow Fernley to amend her lawsuit to prove either would cause harm.

Du issued a new order this month giving Fernley until June 12 to file an amended complaint while the Bureau of Reclamation completed work on the first phase of lining 3.5 miles (5.6 km) of the canal for $35 million continues.

Approximately $2.5 million of the initial phase is expected to be recouped from the Irrigation District through assessments from water users who rely on the District to meet the needs of a growing community that has doubled in size over the past 20 years.

Fernley now wants to show that the loss of groundwater recharge will have dramatic and complicated impacts on the natural environment, as well as on farmers’ wallets.

“It’s going to make our community polluting,” said David Stix, a longtime rancher and former mayor of Fernley.

He said hydrological studies suggest that subsidence in the local aquifer will draw water from saline marshes in the nearby Fernley Wildlife Management Area and deteriorate the community’s water quality.

“This migration would be of great concern because treating salt in water is much more expensive than treating arsenic,” Stix said. “There’s all these unknown domino effects.”

He is among those who say that lining the seawalls, but not the soil where the water seeps away, would achieve all goals at a lower cost without domestic wells “starting to suck in air.”

He fears that unless the aquifer is replenished by percolation, the landscape will eventually return to its pre-canal state.

“It was basically desert,” Stix said. “There was nothing here.”

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When Chol Soo Lee was 12, he left the only home he had ever known to move to San Francisco. He was born during the Korean War and his mother left South Korea to give them a better life. However, when he joined her, he found only misery.

Lee didn’t speak English and school became his nightmare. He was teased for being different and when he tried to explain himself he was frustrated by the language barrier. Once he was so full of pent-up anger that he kicked a director. Lee was sent to a juvenile detention center for battery. Instead of empathy, he found more antagonism at the California Youth Authority. Although no one could communicate with him in his mother tongue, a psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizophrenia.

He spent his teenage years hopping in and out of juvenile prisons. In 1973, the 21-year-old lived in a small apartment at 452 Broadway. In the evenings, he walked a few blocks over to the North Beach strip club district, where he worked as a barker, yelling at passers-by to lure them in for a dance and a drink. Lee would later say that it was there that he saw the gun that got him into so much trouble.

Curious – Lee said he had never held a gun before – he had asked a colleague if he could borrow his pistol. Lee took the gun home and accidentally discharged a live shell into the wall while messing around. Police arrived when someone called 911 about the shooting but left after Lee explained the mishap.

The next day, June 3, 1974, a Chinatown gang leader named Yip Yee Tak walked through the busy intersection of Pacific and Grant just before sunset. Someone approached the man, fired and shot him dead in the street. The suspect charged through the crowd toward Columbus, throwing the gun, a .38 revolver, onto Beckett Street. The police, recalling the incident with Lee the previous day, pounced on the young man and took him into custody. He was amazed to learn he was charged with first degree murder.

What happened next was one of San Francisco’s most egregious miscarriages of justice—and the birth of one of the city’s most complicated heroes.

—

From the outside, the suitcase looked open and closed. Several witnesses identified Lee as the man who saw him kill Tak, and detectives said Lee’s gun was ballistically equivalent to the gun fired in the fatal shooting. San Francisco police speculated that Lee had been hired by one of his own to murder Tak; It was rumored that Tak pocketed $10,000 he had raised under the guise of helping young gang members.

The three main witnesses who testified were white tourists. The arresting officer told the court that Lee was “Chinese.”

“Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about Asian culture would find it very unreal,” Korean-American journalist KW Lee later commented.

The judge, jury, and district attorney were all white. Although there were likely dozens of witnesses in Chinatown that day, none wanted to testify for fear of retaliation from the local gangs. Lee was found guilty.

The verdict barely made a splash in mainstream news, but word began to spread in the Korean-American community that Lee had been wrongly convicted. Sacramento Union reporter KW Lee began investigating the case — and caught up with Chol Soo Lee to hear his side of the story. The men felt a sense of kinship, outsiders in a world that was so often hostile to them.

The stories exploded the case in the Asian American community and made Chol Soo Lee a symbol of the oppression faced by Asian immigrants. The revelations, recounted in the documentary Free Chol Soo Lee, were astounding: A witness, a guard at a juvenile facility while Lee was incarcerated there, recanted his unique identification after learning that he had known Lee as a boy , suggesting Mann had simply mistook the killer’s face for the Asian boy he knew.

Asian American and Pacific Islander students gather at one of the many court protests to fight for the freedom of Chol Soo Lee.

Courtesy of Ken Yamada/Unity Archive Project

Then the only physical evidence in the case fell through. The gun in Lee’s possession was no match for the murder weapon. The SFPD ballistics expert had made a mistake.

The Free Chol Soo Lee movement was underway. The Korean American churches became ground zero for fundraising and outreach. Activists set up stalls in markets and parks. One activist laughed as she recalled in the documentary that people kept coming thinking it was free food; Non-Koreans didn’t know what “Chol Soo Lee” meant.

In 1977 everything changed. In the prison yard of the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, Lee and Aryan Brotherhood member Morrison Needham got into an argument. While scrambling frantically, Lee used a handcrafted knife to stab Needham. The man died, and Lee stood trial for the second time in his young life and was charged with murder. He was found guilty again – Lee claimed the murder was in self-defense – and, now guilty of two counts of murder, was sentenced to death. He was transferred to San Quentin’s death row.

But meanwhile, Lee’s first murder conviction was moving through appeals. In 1979, an appeals court overturned Lee’s original conviction. The celebration was short-lived. Despite compelling evidence that Lee was innocent, the San Francisco Attorney’s Office decided to press charges again. Lee was on trial again for murder.

The 1982 retrial lasted five weeks. It took the jury just two days of deliberation to come to a verdict: not guilty.

The courtroom, filled with Lee’s supporters, erupted in cheers and tears. Before being escorted out of the room, Lee was allowed to briefly address the gallery. “One truth in this case is that I am innocent,” he stated. “This fact has never been disputed, no matter how many witnesses cited it.”

TV news crews surround Chol Soo Lee after he was released from prison on March 28, 1983.

Courtesy of Grant Din

Although he had been acquitted on his first case, Lee was still guilty on his second. He returned to prison and awaited a decision on what would happen next.

“It all raised a complex moral question that still dominates the case: if Lee wasn’t convicted of the first murder and therefore wasn’t even in prison when the second murder took place, how responsible for what happened is later is the criminal justice system itself?” asked the Los Angeles Times.

“We have here a man that a religious person would say is God undergoing a series of metaphysical tests far beyond human capacity,” his attorney Tony Serra told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Prosecutors agreed to present a plea deal: Lee’s previous incarceration would count as time served if he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He did and finally, after a decade, Chol Soo Lee was free.

—

Freedom wasn’t easy for a man who spent his entire adulthood in prison. He was an instant celebrity, bullied at parties and asked to give lectures. During a visit to Los Angeles shortly after his release, he gave the LA Times a melancholy, thoughtful interview. He said he would be sitting alone in his apartment, nervous about escaping and socializing.

Chol Soo Lee on the day of his release.

Courtesy of Grant Din

“I think freedom is more what you feel inside than what you experience,” he mused. “For me, I notice that more and more. So I ended up staying home, listening to the radio and falling asleep.”

Freedom was also full of temptations. In Free Chol Soo Lee, friends recall that drugs and alcohol became Lee’s constant companions, often supplied by acquaintances. He tried quitting a few jobs, and soon “it got worse and worse and I was back on the streets,” Lee wrote in his memoir. A friend said Lee pulled a knife on them while demanding money to cure his addiction. His loved ones, who had stood by him in legal battles for years, felt alienated from the man they once supported.

In 1990, Lee was sentenced to 18 months in prison for drug possession. When he was released, he joined the Chinatown gangs. “I became a disappointment,” Lee wrote, “and an embarrassment.”

He began to associate with Peter Chong, a Hong Kong crime boss sent by his syndicate to set up shop in San Francisco. However, Chong’s grip weakened, and a traitor in his midst told Lee he would pay him $25,000 to burn down Chong’s home in the Outer Sunset Lieutenant: Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow.) Lee drove to Lincoln and 47th and unloaded gas cans from his car. He threw fire accelerant all over the dark, empty house, and just as it caught fire, Lee slipped. He struggled to get back on his feet, full of gas. When he escaped from the burning house, he was on fire from head to toe. The burns covered 90% of his body and severely disfigured his face. It was punishment enough for the judiciary: Lee pleaded guilty to arson and was only given a suspended sentence.

Remarkably, Lee’s community didn’t falter. He was again invited to give public speeches, and for the first time he accepted the task. In speeches for the rest of his life, Lee took responsibility for his vacillations while denouncing the system that had denied him the ability to live a normal life. In a speech featured in Free Chol Soo Lee, Lee looks nervous as he addresses the crowd in front of him. “I feel like a little grain of sand,” he says, “just trying to fit into life.”

In 2014, Lee’s health began to fail irrevocably. A longtime friend who was interviewed for the documentary said it felt like Lee was ready to stop fighting. On December 2, 2014 he died of complications from a stomach illness. Lee was 62.

“He was a victim of people’s expectations,” one of his attorneys once said. “When he went to prison, he was basically a street thug. When he came out 10 years later, people expected him to be some kind of hero.

“He felt a deep responsibility to the people who had supported him and he felt a lot of guilt because he wasn’t what they wanted him to be. It just wasn’t possible.”

“Free Chol Soo Lee” airs Monday at 10 p.m. on KQED and is available to stream via the PBS app.

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“Located in Benicia, California, this historic Capitol building is the oldest state building in California.” (Getty Images)

(NEXSTAR) – California has been a part of the United States since September 8, 1850 – but do you know which of the Golden State’s cities is the oldest?

Well, it depends on what we mean by “eldest”. When we discuss which physical city is ahead of the others, the answer is different than when we discuss which California city legally became a city on paper.

As the Library of Congress explains, California officially became the 31st state in 1850 under the signature of Pres. Millard Fillmore. This means that several areas that were already somehow established became “first” cities at the same time.

In truth, the state’s indigenous communities predate our modern city names. But as the area neared statehood, the following cities emerged as contenders for the title of oldest in modern-day California.

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San Jose

Technically, according to Brittanica, the pueblo of San Jose was founded by Spanish founder José Joaquin Moraga in November 1777 as the state’s first known civil settlement. The pueblo then called San José (note that the accent mark was later dropped) functioned as a trading and agricultural center for nearby military posts.

San Jose was also the capital of California briefly from 1849 to 1852 when it was relocated to Vallejo.

Today, the oldest remnant of the city’s Pueblo days resides in historic Peralta Adobe, also known as Pueblo Numero Uno. According to the San Jose Convention and Visitors Bureau, the house dates back to 1797 and its condition and furnishings are said to resemble how it might have been at the time.

Benicia

This Bay Area city may be the smallest of the cities on this list, but its history is just as rich.

Located in Solano County, Benicia was founded in 1849, according to the City of Benicia. While that date excludes it from the contest for “oldest” city, it is still included because it was already incorporated at the time of California’s accession to the United States

Benicia was also California’s third state capital after facilities in Vallejo were not yet ready for the legislature. The Benicia Public Library explains that the California government moved to Benicia City Hall in February 1853, where operations remained for a year.

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San Diego

1922 scholarly books from the American Historical Society refer to the city of San Diego itself as “the birthplace of California.”

As Clarence Alan McGrew, author of City of San Diego and San Diego County: The Birthplace of California explains, Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo first discovered the coast of San Diego in September 1542—leading Cabrillo and his men to it made the first European settlers to set foot in what would become California.

Of course, by this time, vast communities of indigenous people were already living in what would later be called the golden state.

In the early 1600s, Mexican explorers followed news of the coveted land, but official settlement did not occur until much later, in 1769. Brittanica records that at this point the first Presidio – a military post – was established there, which served as a settlement of its own until it became a pueblo in the 1830s.

Although San Diego was incorporated when California joined the United States in 1850, a bankruptcy resulted in the city losing its charter just two years later, according to the San Diego City Clerk’s Office. The city operated under a board of trustees and remained so until 1889, when a new charter was adopted.

san francisco

Founded in 1776 as a Spanish mission and presidium, the eventual home of the Golden Gate Bridge was originally discovered by European explorers seven years earlier, HISTORY explains.

In the early 1800s, HISTORY reports that the San Francisco de Asis Mission was “the center of spiritual and material life” for over 1,000 local people.

Mexico gained control of the territory in 1821, although the US acquired San Francisco territory in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The busy area continued to grow and become a hub for the entire state and was finally incorporated in April 1850 during the famous Gold Rush.

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Sacramento

While California’s fourth and current capital was colonized by Mexico in 1839 under the name Nueva Helvetia, or “New Switzerland,” the valley was discovered by settlers earlier, Brittanica explains. A Spanish explorer and writer named Pedro Fages had previously named the valley’s river after the Christian Holy Sacraments.

The discovery of gold in the area led to massive population growth over the next 10 years and helped the town gain city rights in 1849. As the City of Sacramento reports, Sacramento is “the oldest incorporated city in California.”

Interesting tidbit: According to the city of Benicia, the gold rush is said to have started after gold in the Sacramento area was discussed at a tavern in Benicia.

Eventually, the California legislature moved to Sacramento in 1854, and the city was elected the permanent state capital in 1879.

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When I was growing up in San Francisco, every Passover my very secular mother would try, with mixed results, to ensure my brother and I had something of a normal Seder. At those Seders, one of which was written about in the pages of this newspaper in 1980, there were sometimes more Catholics than Jews around the table and nothing could start until I got home from baseball practice and asked the four questions — CYO athletics did not cancel practice for Jewish holidays back then. We never quite knew what we were doing and the Jews seemed much less stressed out about it than the Catholics, but the food was always excellent. Those long ago seders reminded me of why Jewish San Francisco has always been both fascinating and puzzling for me.

It has long struck me that back in New York the question “Are you Jewish?” was usually met by a one word answer, yes or no. In San Francisco, it has always been more of an essay question.

Those essay responses I have heard over the years include things like, “Well, we’re not religious, but my family is Jewish and we sometimes…” Or “My father is Jewish and my mother converted, but I haven’t set foot in a synagogue (very rarely shul) for years and I never had a bat mitzvah…” Or “Culturally I am, but I don’t believe and I don’t speak any Hebrew…”

It is always nice to learn more about people, but the unwillingness or inability of many Jewish San Franciscans to answer that simple question has always mystified and bothered me. I am also aware that my own personal story of being a Jew who spent 10 years attending a San Francisco Catholic School is a source of frequent comfort, and humor, to my Jewish friends and family in New York.

A few years ago, I found myself reconnecting with an old friend with a Jewish sounding last name and asking her, “To what extent are you Jewish?” I used the odd syntax because, anticipating an essay in response, I asked an essay question. She explained that she was in fact Jewish, with a family history not unlike mine and then indicated that she had long thought there was a lot of anti-Semitism at our old high school, but had never really discussed it. I assured her she was right about that.

For many generations, Jewish San Francisco had a very different feel than other urban Jewish communities in the US To use the language of another group, Jews in San Francisco were not always quite out, never fully comfortable or public about who we were. It is also true that San Francisco’s Jewish community has long played an important role in the political, civic, cultural and financial life of San Francisco. These two points are probably related.

The long history of Jewish San Francisco includes numerous civic and business leaders going back to Levi Strauss in the days of the Gold Rush and including people like Herbert Fleishhacker and Benjamin Swig in the last century. The City also was one of the first in the country to have a Jewish mayor, actually two — Washington Bartlett and Adolph Sutro, almost 80 years before New York.

But for much of that time, the unspoken social contract for Jewish San Francisco was discretion in exchange for tolerance. That arrangement seemed to work in some respects, as San Francisco has always been a city where Jews can succeed in pretty much any professional field they want — including managing the local baseball team to the best record in the Major Leagues, as Gabe Kapler did last year — but also where speaking Yiddish loudly, flaunting our religious observance and reveling in Jewish American culture was never quite accepted.

In other words, San Francisco was for many years an easy place to Jewish, but less so to be a New York Jew. Or less charitably, a fine place to be Jewish, but not to make such a fuss about it.

Many Jewish San Franciscans with deeper roots in The City than me — my family arrived from New York in 1971 — understand this dynamic instinctively, but it took us a long time to figure it out. During the 1970s and 1980s, when we heard the phrase “pushy New Yorker” out of the mouths of too many San Franciscans, my mother, brother and I understood it to be code not simply for “Jew” but for “New York Jew. ” However, New York has been the capital of world Jewry for well over a century, so if you have a problem with Jews from New York, there may be uglier sentiments lurking there as well.

As any San Franciscan with a sense of history knows, The City’s most famous proud New York Jew was Harvey Milk. Milk was brash, had a quick and sarcastic sense of humor, spoke with an unmistakable and charming (at least to some of us) Outer Borough accent and brought a Jewish perspective to his advocacy for LGBTQ rights, not least through his frequent mention of how the Holocaust informed his views as a gay Jewish man.

The story of Milk’s assassination is well known, and it is primarily part of LGBTQ history, but the Jewish angle has also struck me as oddly overlooked. In many other American cities, if a right-wing politician who had campaigned on a pledge to “eradicate malignancies that plague our city” had killed the highest profile Jewish politician in town, who had arrived recently from New York, it would have been understood as also a Jewish story. But that perspective has usually been overlooked in San Francisco.

Things have changed since the 1970s, as Jewish San Francisco has been altered by more Jews from the East and the Midwest moving in, making the Jewish experience in San Francisco a bit more like that of other major cities. San Francisco’s Jewish community has not been entirely transformed, but those essay answers may be getting shorter. So, as we used to say in Catholic School, Chag Sameach!

Lincoln Mitchell has written numerous books and articles on The City and the Giants. Visit lincolnmitchell.com or follow him on Twitter @LincolnMitchell

The post Opinion: The query ‘Are you Jewish?’ has an advanced reply in San Francisco appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

From Carly Schwartz

San Francisco currently has no shortage of challenges.

More residents are uninhabited than ever before. Our guides cannot decide whether to close a street in Golden Gate Park or build new homes in an empty parking lot. When I walk my dog, we often tiptoe around broken glass on the sidewalk from another car break-in. Our school district is so broke that it faces a government takeover if it doesn’t get its finances in order.

These problems become even more apparent when you read the headlines. On any day, flick through breaking articles about San Francisco – both locally and nationally – and you’ll see a barrage of stories about how our criminal wasteland reached the point of no going back. Our reputation has sunk so low that even journalists are now writing about our image problem. Like meta.

Yet San Francisco remains a world-class, diverse, and colorful city for so many reasons. In the past year, more funds were allocated to support local start-ups than in any other region in the world. City hall is sitting on excess cash to fight homelessness. Public art is popping up in neighborhoods across the city, from the new installation in front of the Asian Art Museum to the mural in the mission honoring Carlos Santana and his little brother. Our problems may be numerous, but so are the ways we can address them.

Humans have the unique ability to give meaning to the world through storytelling. Stories reflect our reality, and society, in turn, is shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. If we keep up the story that San Francisco was irreparably broken, our city will only continue to collapse. It’s time to use storytelling to create a better place to live and work.

This is where The San Francisco Examiner comes in. For the first time in many years, the city’s oldest newspaper is locally owned and growing. Since I came on board as Editor-in-Chief six months ago, my team has worked hard to reshape our future. Today we are proud to introduce the first of many new initiatives: a redesigned print edition that reflects the real San Francisco in all its intricate glory.

The new Examiner’s pages don’t look like a traditional newspaper. We’ve broken them down into five key ways that capture The City from a new perspective:

Results takes a deeper look at the stories behind the headlines. Rather than recording everyday events in San Francisco as other local newspapers do, we will examine why things are the way they are in order to fundamentally understand our problems and how we can address them.

corrections explores how we could then begin to address our problems. Studies have shown that solution-oriented journalism makes readers more likely to search for news, increase problem-solving skills, and motivate readers to engage with their community. We’re not pretending to have the answers, but we definitely want to explore what they might look like.

Faces brings to life the many characters spread across our 49 square miles. Cities are made up of people, and the more personalities we can pack into our pages, the more accurately we can represent our home. We will use this section to profile and reinforce the interesting voices that drive San Francisco forward each day.

Forum enables us to take a stand on issues and take strong, sharp, innovative standpoints. We are not afraid to fight for a better San Francisco, and to do so we must hold our leaders accountable. We will cultivate a number of keen, fact-borne perspectives to enable readers to form an educated opinion on relevant matters.

And finally, fanfare captures the local zeitgeist through art, leisure, food, culture and sport. After all, having fun is still important! Our critics and experience junkies will preserve our culture both for ourselves and for future generations. This moment is meaningful and interesting – especially when we are through a global pandemic – and there is room to indulge in it.

We hope you enjoy the first edition of our reinvented approach to local news. Use these pages to create a deeper connection with the San Francisco that you know and love – a complex city worth scrutinizing but also worth celebrating.

Carly Schwartz is the editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Examiner.

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