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Homelessness within the US: Can “tiny houses” assist with the reasonably priced housing disaster?

Daily SF News — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 15:32:42 +0000

Sharon Sandelin is a resident at 33 Gough Street in San Francisco.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Before she moved into the first shelter village of “tiny houses” in San Francisco, Sharon Sandelin — a 66-year-old who goes by “Mama T” — had been sleeping on the streets.

Now she lives in a 64-square-foot unit with heat, electricity, a twin bed, desk, and chair. There is a combination lock on the outside. The gated community where some 70 other people now live is clean and cheerful-looking, painted teal and sea-foam green. Residents are connected with supportive services like health care and served three meals daily.

Sandelin detests traditional homeless shelters, and appreciates the privacy of her locked room on Gough Street, knowing she can rest undisturbed. But she still considers herself homeless. Though she likes her tiny cabin more than she liked being unsheltered, residents must use porta-potties, they are not allowed to have outside visitors, they can’t shower after 2 pm, and they can’t cook anything that requires more than a microwave or toaster.

“I want to eat my own cooking,” she told me. “My daughter can’t visit me, and there shouldn’t be no set time for a person to take a shower.”

Sharon Sandelin is a resident at 33 Gough Street in San Francisco.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Sandelin has a place to sleep in large part because of Elizabeth Funk, who spent three decades working at investment firms and tech giants like Yahoo and Microsoft, while serving on boards of various homeless nonprofits. Since 2020, Funk, now the CEO of Dignity Moves, which fundraised and developed the San Francisco village, has brought her experience and Rolodex to bear on a singular goal: to, as Silicon Valley puts it, disrupt the problem of homelessness in America.

Since 2016, unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping somewhere not designed for human residence, like a car, a park, or a train station — has been going up. Particularly on the West Coast where housing costs are often prohibitive, local governments have struggled to curb sprawling and politically unpopular tent encampments, and many unhoused people prefer sleeping outside to crowded shelters with bunk beds. The challenge has been exacerbated by Martin v. Boise, a 2018 court ruling that said people can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.

Elizabeth Funk, founder and CEO of Dignity Moves.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

To Funk and other tiny house proponents, villages like the one where Sandelin now lives offer creative solutions to all these issues. The small, relocatable cabins provide leaders new ways to bypass restrictive zoning rules, by leveraging emergency building codes and “borrowing” rather than purchasing land. They also offer, at least for some, a more dignified shelter option, providing an affordable answer to the difficult reality that many people prefer to sleep outside rather than endure the rules and conditions of typical shelters.

Advocates of “tiny homes” as a solution to the homeless crisis say the units should be understood as a key tool to preventing chronic homelessness amid a brutal housing shortage. If people lose their homes but can get quickly off the streets into a temporary private dwelling, then they’re in a much better position to get back on their feet, and avoid the tumble into longer-term homelessness that can transpire from even just a few weeks without shelter.

For elected officials, the villages also mean that fewer people have to see — or think about — homeless people on a daily basis. Tiny homes provide leaders with a faster and cheaper alternative to building permanent housing or congregate shelters, and may provide cities with the legal authority to then clear out any remaining tent encampments: Funk told me she can determine “exactly how many units you need in order to make it illegal to sleep on the streets within the city limits in San Francisco.” All this has thrilled leaders eager to reclaim their cities from what they see as spiraling chaos and disorder.

Advocates for the homeless, meanwhile, worry that the tiny shelter boom will divert funds that could otherwise go to new permanent housing, preventing people from moving into a real home for even longer. The rush of private industry into the space also gives advocates pause, and they worry that cities will buy bare-bones, cheaper models, place them in remote parts of town, and criminalize those who refuse to go.

At the heart of the tiny houses debate is a question about the meaning of housing and shelter itself. As more companies rush to manufacture models with varying features — some out of plastic, some out of repurposed shipping containers, some built on factory assembly lines, others on-site or on wheels, some with in-suite bathrooms, kitchenettes, and storage space, others lacking plumbing and electricity and with virtually no amenities at all — there is little consensus on what a “tiny home” is, or what standards it must meet.

Tiny house shelter units are typically between 60 and 150 square feet, but the sharp variety of products within the industry creates confusion. How spartan is acceptable? Is anything better than sleeping outside?

Lots of arrangements can be tolerated if they’re understood as emergency solutions — but some communities have also started to explore the idea of treating the units less as temporary shelters and more as something approaching new housing options.

“Harnessing NIMBY” to expand tiny houses

America has a housing shortage in part because it’s become so expensive and difficult to build new housing. The cost to purchase new land has skyrocketed, byzantine zoning rules make residential construction hard, and people living in communities often protest new development — wary of decreased property values, new neighbors, noise, traffic, or general change. This barrier is so common it goes by NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard.”

Yet over the last few years, “tiny home” shelters have been built in communities through what you could call creative hacks of the zoning code. In some places, structures smaller than 120 square feet are not classified as permanent dwellings, and therefore not subject to the same regulations applicable to residential buildings. Other groups have capitalized on cities that declared local states of emergency, which give governments more flexibility to build units with faster permitting.

Dignity Moves is a transitional housing program in San Francisco. These 70 modular units are set at 33 Gough Street, right in the middle of San Francisco. They offer the unhoused a non-congregate shelter option.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Dignity Moves formed in 2020 as a task force within the Young Presidents Organization, a global networking group of chief executives. The group wanted to “apply private sector approaches and Silicon Valley-style ‘disruptive thinking’” to America’s homelessness crisis, as they describe it.

Funk could hardly hold back her grin as she outlined Dignity Moves’ theory of change. Instead of buying expensive land for tiny houses, she told me, they “borrow” it from developers who aren’t yet ready to use it.

Leveraging emergency building codes and word-of-mouth networking, “we take advantage of under-utilized assets,” she said. Maybe the shelters will go on a plot of land for two or three years, and then get transferred via forklift to another location when the developer needs their property back. (There are certain tax breaks available for landowners interested in making this deal.) The San Francisco village I visited on Gough Street rests on such borrowed land.

Sometimes Dignity Moves encourages faith-based groups or local governments to pony up their vacant property — like parking lots or land reserved for future infrastructure projects. In Santa Barbara, leaders countywide have jointly committed to finding locations for tiny houses in their neighborhoods and giving shelter priority to those sleeping outside in the surrounding areas. Funk’s group is spearheading this, and envisions the future playing out similarly in cities all over the country. By erecting many villages at the same time, Funk thinks it’ll be possible to get people off the street at once, a strong incentive for housed residents who are tired of seeing individuals living on sidewalks. “Then we can harness NIMBYism, which is a very powerful force,” she said.

There are at least some encouraging signs that local opposition to tiny house shelters wanes. When researchers at Portland State University surveyed housed neighbors who lived around various Portland “tiny homes” villages, they found the neighbors’ concerns about crime and decreased property values significantly diminished over time. “Some of the biggest initial opponents became some of the biggest champions,” Todd Ferry, a lead researcher of the study, told me. “I genuinely think it became beloved to many people in the neighborhood.”

Perhaps no politician has been more enthusiastic about the potential of tiny house shelters than San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who proposed this past summer to divert more than a third of his city’s housing funds to increase village production. Up for reelection in March, Mahan has made moving unhoused people quickly off the street a major part of his pitch.

San Jose started opening “tiny home” shelters about four years ago, originally to reduce the risk of contagion during the pandemic. About 500 units currently exist now in the city across six locations, and hundreds more are in the pipeline. Mahan credits their growth with reducing San Jose’s unsheltered homeless population by 11 percent in the last year, though he laments that new units seem to be taking longer to build than they did during Covid-19 and coming with new requirements.

“We were standing these up in six months at a cost of $80,000 or less all-in, including the utility hookup and common space, and now it’s taking progressively longer and costing more,” he told me, pointing to a new village project that cost the city $250,000 a door. Another San Jose village that took a year and a half to build saw costs go from originally $100,000 per unit to more than $175,000.

In September, Mahan urged his colleagues to quit making excuses for why they couldn’t build more units faster, and led a successful push to adopt a shelter crisis emergency declaration so San Jose could bypass certain building rules. Mahan says he’s motivated not only by a desire to help the homeless but to improve local neighborhoods generally. Calls for crime, fire, and blight in the immediate areas of the villages went down a year after they were built, according to a city analysis.

Each tiny house village in San Jose costs about $15 million to launch, and $3-4 million annually thereafter to operate. In June, the city’s budget director said funding roughly 1,400 of these shelter units will cost upward of $60 million by 2030, a “difficult” figure for San Jose to manage. The mayor, for his part, remains optimistic that external funding sources will come through.

Out of sight, out of mind?

Another reason some have grown excited about “tiny home” shelters is often left unsaid: to no longer have to witness homeless people outside on a daily basis.

Tiny houses provide elected officials with faster and cheaper alternatives to building permanent housing or congregate shelters, and may provide cities with the legal authority to then clear out any remaining tent encampments. This has roused city elites anxious about their increasingly visible homeless crisis.

A federal lawsuit led by Los Angeles business leaders frustrated with their city’s lack of action around tent encampments resulted in LA pledging to construct up to 16,000 new shelter beds by 2027, to house 60 percent of the homeless population in each of the fifteen council districts. These can include “tiny home” shelters, and in exchange, LA officials can sweep remaining tents and resume enforcing anti-camping bans.

“We are now getting much more excited about this 60 percent thing,” Funk, of Dignity Moves, told me. “I’m going to be working privately, quietly, but [to] give you a little preview, [we’re] thinking about doing this for San Francisco specifically as well in San Jose.” If San Francisco has about 4,500 people sleeping outside, according to the last Point In Time count, then Funk believes leaders can confidently estimate how many shelter beds will be necessary to build to start enforcing anti-camping laws again. “Let’s be clear,” she said, “one of the big motives here is Martin v. Boise, and people being concerned about getting sued.”

Funk’s legislative partner in the California state Senate, Josh Becker, plans to reintroduce a bill that would make it easier for cities to build tiny house shelters, and potentially even allow cities to count them toward their state-mandated housing production goals. Given that the tiny structures are much cheaper to build than both traditional housing and permanent supportive housing, a state green-light to include them in production targets could prove to be a major incentive. But that’s worrying news for those concerned the units may be less of a temporary, emergency solution after all.

Bryant Akers works on repairs at 33 Gough Street.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

“We’re definitely seeing some cities focusing on this model as more than what I would call an interim solution and a gap solution,” said Amy King, the CEO of Pallet Shelter, a Washington-based company that produces tiny houses between $7,500 to $12,000 apiece.

When Becker’s bill was first introduced earlier this year and included the possibility that shelter units, including those produced by Pallet Shelter, could one day be considered permanent housing and even accept rent or housing vouchers, King’s company came out against it. “There’s just so much opportunity for people to take advantage,” King said of the idea.

Homeless advocates worry about a scenario where cities start to invest in lower-quality shelters that aren’t suitable for everyone, reduce investments in permanent housing, and grow more aggressive about fining or arresting those resistant to shelter offers. “We see sweeps and tiny homes going hand-in-hand,” said Alex Visotzky, with the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

A senior official with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told me the agency has no hard-and-fast policy yet on tiny houses, but is currently “evaluating whether there’s a place for them” in their efforts to end homelessness. As part of that the federal housing agency is investigating whether communities have been abiding by fair housing and civil rights laws as they expand the units.

“Not just segregation, but are people put there by choice?” the official asked. “Are there potential consequences if you don’t go there — like subject to arrest or other penalties? We’re considering all of that.”

The line between housing and shelter

In 2020 a fire broke out within a Pallet Shelter community in Banning, California — destroying 19 prefabricated homes, and displacing 38 people. Two years later another fire broke out within a Pallet Shelter community in Oakland, California, burning down three of the structures. One resident told Curbed she barely made it out as “the walls were melting” around her.

Pallet has denied responsibility for these fires, though the company did make changes to the building materials it uses. The two incidents loom large as leaders debate how cheaply they can build these structures and how tightly together they can pack them together on high-priced land.

A row of Pallet shelters at the Chandler Street Tiny Home Village in February 2021 in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Some housing advocates say the challenges cities are running into with building tiny shelters now mirror the same issues that often derail producing more housing at all. Proponents fear that as more pandemic-era emergency codes expire, and if more accidents like those in Banning and Oakland occur, such “quick-build bridge housing” will be built far less quickly.

“Our biggest challenge is the regulations, the code compliance to make sure everything meets all the parameters of the building code,” said Viken Ohanesian, CEO of Boss Cubez, which manufactured the prefabricated units used at the San Francisco shelter village. “It’s kind of like you can never have too much insurance, you can never be too safe in this world that we live in because it’s a litigious world.”

One option is to try and convince state lawmakers to pre-empt cities from tacking on new regulatory requirements. California lawmakers already took this step last year in banning mandates for fire sprinklers in “temporary sleeping cabins.” Funk says she’s “really, quite frankly, tempted to take the 10 other things that cities are starting to ask for, take them up to Daddy and say, ‘Can you break this rule?’” The costly rules and regulations, she believes, are a big part of how we got the housing crisis in the first place.

“I think our definition of housing with a capital ‘H’ is causing homelessness,” she said. “So we can either solve it or we can be stuck to our like, you know, our principles.”

Beyond worrying about building requirements and the practical longevity of tiny shelters, a broader, more existential set of criticisms have emerged around the policy idea.

A worker cleans in front of a row of tiny homes for the homeless, in February 2021, in the North Hollywood section of Los Angeles.

AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez

One major concern is that investments in “tiny home” structures actually sustain homelessness, by diverting needed investments from permanent housing. Many people living in temporary shelters of all kinds end up returning to the streets after their allotted time to stay ends, not having anywhere else to go.

“Until there is more affordable housing, this ‘solution’ leads nowhere,” argued Josh Kruger, a formerly homeless journalist in Philadelphia. “Instead, these are just feel-good boondoggles so middle and upper class people can feel like they’re doing something … They’re storage sheds for human beings who otherwise remind us all of our society’s failure to care.”

In 2021 the Washington state’s Lived Experience Coalition — a group of current and formerly homeless individuals — issued a statement lambasting the “dehumanizing conditions and lack of services” some experience in tiny house villages, and warned of lawmakers who avert focus from more permanent solutions. In Seattle, for example, some residents lived in tiny wood huts that lacked heat and electricity, where school children had to do their homework with flashlights.

Barbara Poppe, the former executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness during the Obama administration, said while some models are better than existing congregate homeless shelters, some are “far worse.” What really alarms her, she told me, is the “corporate investor model, for-profit industry” that’s cropped up, naming companies like Tuff Shed and Pallet Shelter as examples.

“Some of these are quite inhumane, and some of those cost studies — Pallet will say it costs $12,000 [per door], but that’s a sleight of hand, it’s very deceiving, because there’s all the site preparation cost on top,” she said. “It seems like what the public wants and by extension what the elected officials say they want is an easy answer and a cheaper answer to the fact that we have an extreme affordable housing crisis that sits on top of growing inequality.”

For advocates like Visotzky with the National Alliance to End Homelessness, conceptualizing housing and shelter as distinct categories remains important. “If we start calling [tiny homes] housing then folks are going to potentially lose eligibility for a lot of key services and resources,” he said. “We need to make commitments and not shortcuts.”

Supporters of building more tiny houses say their critics are stuck in the status quo, implicitly accepting that thousands of people will remain outside. They say it’s a false choice that cities can’t invest in both permanent and interim solutions at once, and that the crisis demands vision and urgency.

“One of the biggest hurdles that’s blocking us from ending unsheltered homelessness is lost optimism,” said Funk. “Dignity Moves’ value-add can be to come in and say, ‘Oh, no, it’s very possible, here’s exactly the paint-by-color map of how.”

What does a real dignified investment look like?

The Connect Homes factory in San Bernardino, California, located about an hour outside Los Angeles, had homeless shelters on the assembly line the day I visited in mid-October. The company was working to fulfill a contract for Long Beach, California, which plans to open its first village of tiny house shelters in early 2025.

A view of the Connect Homes manufacturing plant in San Bernardino, California, on October 23, 2023.

John Francis Peters for Vox

Originally founded in 2012 to produce factory-built houses, Connect Homes leaders realized during the pandemic they could use virtually their same industrial tools to develop shelters, too. The company now wants to build shelters nationwide.

John Francis Peters for Vox

Gordon Stott, co-founder of Connect Homes, explains new homes in various stages of production. These will be used as interim housing in Long Beach, California.

“Is it housing, or is it shelter? Well I think what we’re seeing is it can be both,” said co-founder Gordon Stott. While at a higher price point than some of his competitors — units can be sold to cities at $80,000 per door — Stott believes his products are more durable investments, and prove homeless shelters don’t have to be ugly or stigmatized.

The shelter units set for Long Beach will be between 110 and 185 square feet (the larger ones will be ADA-accessible) and the city specifically looked for vendors who could build units with en suite bathrooms. The city used part of a $25 million state grant to finance the construction and expects to spend about $930,000 per year annually in operating costs.

Workers build tiny homes at the Connect Homes manufacturing plant.

John Francis Peters for Vox

“We’re in a moment where cities are having to step up and do things they haven’t done before,” Rex Richardson, Long Beach’s mayor, told me. “We’ve had a big history of dealing with homelessness and providing housing but we weren’t prepared for the crisis — the way it manifested — with a 62 percent increase between 2020 and 2022.”

A Connect Homes employee works on a bathroom floor for a new shelter that will be used as interim housing.

John Francis Peters for Vox

Models with private bathrooms might deter some local governments, tempted to spend as little as possible. But if the structures are likely to stick around for years in a city, and if people are likely to live in them for extended periods of time, then investing in nicer units with higher standards makes more sense. Ferry, with Portland State University, said he tells municipalities considering tiny house villages “to think really carefully about” their request for proposals, or RFPs. If you put out a contract for a non-congregate shelter between 70 and 150 square feet with no other specifications, then you’re generally obligated to go with the cheapest bidder.

John Francis Peters for Vox

Connect Homes shelter products, from construction to finished and on display at the Connect Homes manufacturing plant in San Bernardino, on October 23.

For now though, most leaders have been drawn to companies that offer cheaper upfront products. While most players on the market say their relocatable shelters can last at least a decade if not more, none have been operating long enough to really put their claims to the test, to truly see if “tiny home” units can last, bouncing around from plot of land to plot of land.

Patrick Monahan, a 42-year-old resident of the shelter village in San Francisco, had been sleeping outside off and on for almost 10 years before he moved into his tiny cabin on Gough Street.

Volunteers plant gardens for the residents at 33 Gough Street.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Patrick Monahan is a resident at 33 Gough Street.

Gabriela Hasbun for Vox

Monahan never wanted to stay in traditional homeless shelters, and he’s appreciative of what the village offers him: a “fairly safe” environment that’s “very pretty and clean” and where the “food’s not great, but it’s free.” He doesn’t love using a porta-potty but thinks it’s better than going on the street.

Still, Monahan holds out hope that one day he’ll have something more. “I can’t have visitors here,” he said. “I rather have my own place, that’s mine.”

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Homelessness within the San Francisco Bay Space: The disaster and a path ahead

Daily SF News — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 08:14:27 +0000

Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area has reached crisis proportions. The region has the third-largest population of people experiencing homelessness in the United States, behind only New York City and Los Angeles. Two-thirds of the Bay Area’s homeless residents are living on the street, in their cars, or in encampments, while the remainder live with daily uncertainty over whether their bed at night will be a relative’s couch or a temporary shelter cot. Tent encampments are becoming a visible feature of the region’s streetscape, and the crisis is placing an undue burden on auxiliary support systems, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and behavioral health. Despite concerted effort by public officials and substantial investment in housing and related supports and services, the number of homeless is growing, as inflows continue to outpace outflows.

Addressing this issue will likely require a regional, multi-stakeholder approach that holistically supports homeless families across the full journey, from housing insecure to homeless to housed, and integrates resources across the government, nonprofit, and private sectors.

The journey from housing insecure to homeless to housed

While most of the public thinks about homelessness as “unsheltered” homelessness, or street homelessness, the reality is a broader journey as individuals enter, experience, and transition out of homelessness, with myriad possible interventions along the spectrum (Exhibit 1). Complicating the crisis further are the facts that an individual or family’s path into and out of homelessness is often not straightforward and that the support system itself is fragmented, with limited communication and data sharing between service providers and across regions. Efforts to improve the crisis response system will benefit from an end-to-end strategy to stem the instances of entry into homelessness, increase exit opportunities, and better coordinate care across the support spectrum to ensure people don’t get “stuck.”

The state of the crisis in the Bay Area

Based on a 2017 point-in-time (PIT) count, 28,200 people were estimated to be homeless in the Bay Area, with 70 percent of these living in Santa Clara, San Francisco, and Alameda Counties (Exhibit 2). Preliminary PIT counts released in 2019 indicate an increase of 17 percent in San Francisco, 31 percent in Santa Clara, and 43 percent in Alameda Counties from 2017 to 2019. The total number experiencing homelessness in a given year is likely substantially higher: PIT counts may underestimate persons experiencing homelessness on an annual basis by at least two to three times.

Contrary to popular myth, the majority of homeless persons in the Bay Area are not coming from other regions: 89 percent of people experiencing homelessness in 2017 reported living in their county for one or more years. However, practitioners report high rates of interregional mobility, with persons experiencing homelessness crossing county lines regularly, many separated only by a short bus or metro trip.

A large portion of the Bay Area homeless population is unsheltered: 67 percent in 2017, second only to Los Angeles. Relative to other metropolitan areas, the Bay Area also has high rates of chronic and youth homelessness (Exhibit 3).

How we got here

The combination of a long-standing housing-affordability crisis, insufficient inventory, and a lack of system-level and regional coordination means the Bay Area has failed to sufficiently stem inflows, increase exits, and effectively navigate those experiencing homelessness to lasting solutions.

Housing affordability

Long-standing housing-affordability challenges affect every stage of the Bay Area’s homelessness cycle. From 1999 to 2014, the Bay Area permitted construction of 61,000 fewer very-low-income affordable-housing units than recommended by the state and lost a substantial portion of existing housing inventory to market pressures—in San Francisco, for every two affordable housing units created, the city lost more than one from its existing inventory because of units being permanently withdrawn from the protection of rent control.

The result is a severe housing shortage: according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, as of 2017, in the San Francisco–Oakland–Hayward and San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara metropolitan areas alone, there was a supply gap of more than 157,500 affordable and available units for extremely low-income households. Two-thirds of extremely low-income households lived in rental accommodations they struggled to afford, leaving them one unexpected expense away from entering homelessness (Exhibit 4).

Insufficient inventory

Insufficient inventory across the homelessness spectrum further limits exit opportunities and leaves many waiting on permanent solutions without a temporary home. In keeping with the national push for Housing First, the Bay Area has doubled down on increasing permanent-supportive-housing and rapid-rehousing options. However, in light of the affordability challenges previously discussed, current inventory is not nearly enough to meet demand. Accounting for permanent-supportive-housing and rapid-rehousing supports, the current Bay Area crisis-response system currently shelters 30,000 homeless individuals. Assuming current bed-count utilization is at 100 percent, more than 28,000 additional individuals require permanent housing, with more than 18,000 of those in need of immediate shelter (Exhibit 5). Ultimately, an “all of the above” strategy is required: the right mix of affordable housing, permanent supportive housing, and temporary shelters to meet the full accommodation need.

Lack of coordination

The Bay Area’s crisis-response system is highly fragmented, with limited communication and data sharing between service providers and across regions. Each county operates its own Continuum of Care: submitting its own strategic plan, collecting its own data on its homelessness population and system performance, and receiving its own funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Given the substantial interregional mobility of the Bay Area’s homeless population, this approach impedes understanding of current service needs and gaps; it also hampers much-needed collaboration to determine the most effective strategies to meet growing need.

Pillars of the solution

Practitioners across the system agree: there is no silver bullet. Progress on the issue will likely require regionally coordinated efforts by governments, philanthropists, and the private sector across three key spheres.

1. Meet the accommodation need

At its core, the solution to homelessness is a home. The Bay Area must expand the housing supply available to extremely low-income households to keep people in their homes and increase exit opportunities into permanent housing solutions. Efforts will need to target both families and individuals able to benefit from rapid rehousing services, as well as the Bay Area’s large chronically homeless population, who, in most cases, require housing with wraparound services in order to successfully transition out of homelessness and remain housed long term. These solutions aren’t free, but neither is the status quo: a 2015 study in Santa Clara County estimated that indirect costs of homelessness on the healthcare, criminal justice, and social services systems amounted to more than $520 million annually.

Meeting the affordable-housing gap will likely not be possible under the status quo: convoluted permitting, high construction costs, and long timelines fraught with administrative bottlenecks impede meaningful progress. Renewed efforts by stakeholders in the public and private spheres could reduce the time and cost needed to build new units, incentivize housing production for lower-income brackets, and test and scale innovative models to meet accommodation needs and provide the necessary support services.

2. Drive greater state and regional collaboration

The fragmented solution landscape and intraregional mobility of the Bay Area’s homeless population point to the importance of a cohesive strategic approach to homelessness that integrates funding, data collection, and advocacy efforts between service providers and across regions. Creation of a regional Bay Area Homeless Management Information System could help to build a more accurate map of inflows, exits, available services, gaps, and cost to serve. Establishing a regional homelessness-management plan—like the regional emergency-management systems that have been set up in the wake of disasters—could enhance service delivery, reduce redundancies, increase accountability, and enhance the region’s power to advocate at the state and national levels.

3. Engage private and philanthropic capital to enhance services and pilot innovative solutions

Private and philanthropic dollars can be deployed in innovative ways to expand and improve services for current homelessness populations. Public–private partnerships and innovative models, such as pay for success, could mobilize much-needed capital to rapidly test and scale highly effective interventions. Fast-growth employers expanding in the Bay Area can add housing as they expand or invest in efforts to preserve affordability, such as the recent Partnership for the Bay’s Future, supported by Facebook, Genentech, Kaiser Permanente, and several local foundations. Innovative technologies can enhance outreach efforts, reduce costs, and simplify complexities in the current service system.

Unprecedented growth in the Bay Area has brought unprecedented challenges. The region has long been an engine of growth and prosperity, but it has also increasingly become marked by unaffordability and inexcusable conditions for our most vulnerable. The problem is not intractable: the Bay Area has the intellect and resources to turn the tide, but doing so will likely require additional resources and a more cohesive, coordinated, and substantial approach than the status quo.

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Professor Exposes Drivers of San Francisco’s Housing Disaster

Daily SF News — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 21:21:07 +0000

With its majestic hills, mystic fog and magical afternoon light, San Francisco is one of the most photogenic and expensive cities in the world, with the median home price hitting $1.4 million in 2023.

It’s a city that Moira O’Neill, an urban planning and local government law scholar at the University of Virginia, knows well, even though she was born and raised on the other side of the bay, in Oakland. These two California cities have been in the media for years because of their rising housing costs and the debate around the relationship between housing supply, gentrification and displacement. But the cities are at the center of O’Neill’s research about what drives regional and neighborhood-level inequality.

These topics aren’t abstract for O’Neill. She grew up poor, in a city much less affluent than its neighbors in the region, and went to public schools that were de facto segregated. For that reason, understanding how law can remedy or perpetuate inequality has long been a personal mission for O’Neill — an effort that culminated last week in the heralded release of a California-funded investigative research report that prompted the state to require the city to overhaul a zoning and permitting process that has stymied housing construction.

As O’Neill told The New York Times after her report was released, San Francisco has progressive zoning laws on paper, but its actual practices — which her report uncovered — have resulted in a city that excludes middle- and lower-income workers.

“It’s a progressive city, but there’s this contradiction,” she said in the Times article. “It’s really, really important to highlight not just for California, but for the country, how it’s possible to use procedural rules to be exclusive and block the ability to house people.”

Over the years, pundits and politicians have thrown out various explanations for the astronomical home prices in San Francisco, from generally blaming liberal policies to more specific issues such as the booming tech economy, the cost of labor and building materials, and the expense of addressing environmental regulations.

That last claim was a tipping point for O’Neill, whose scholarship harnesses empirical and data-driven evidence to support state and local government efforts to address both climate change and inequality. Now holding a joint faculty appointment in UVA’s School of Architecture and School of Law, O’Neill still serves as an associate research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also previously taught at the College of Environmental Design and at the law school.

When she began working as a researcher at Berkeley in 2012, O’Neill took a close look at how other fields — like urban planning and public health — understood and evaluated law. That’s when she began designing a project to use more detailed data and interdisciplinary methods to tease out the details of how state and local law shape housing development patterns in very different cities.

In 2016, she started talking about her work to a colleague at Berkeley Law, Eric Biber, who taught environmental law. “I told him about my concerns and said, ‘Here’s why this matters to me,’” O’Neill said. “‘Because urban economists are saying that it’s environmental law in California that’s blocking housing, and from working in this space, I don’t think it’s that simple and I don’t think we have the right data to fix anything.’”

Biber agreed, but he didn’t need convincing to join her efforts. “He had his own reasons for wanting to launch this work,” O’Neill said.

Working with a law student, they launched an initial study in San Francisco. “So I had partners — we still had no money, but we had a team,” O’Neill laughed.

By 2017, a program officer at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation took notice of their work and provided O’Neill and Biber their first grant to fund expansion of the work into four neighboring cities in the region. O’Neill and her colleagues released their first working paper in February 2018, sharing initial findings from the dataset that would become known as CALES, short for Comprehensive Assessment of Land Use Entitlements Study.

Within months, the paper’s findings would show up in the analysis supporting legislative reform to close loopholes in existing state housing law. “Now we had a proof of concept on what precise, detailed data could do for legislative reform.”

Other funding then showed up, including money from the California Air Resources Board.

Over the next several years, O’Neill and her colleagues at Berkeley continued to collaborate on papers looking at the CALES data from different angles — but always with consistent methodology. In one instance, the CALES data showed that local governments were choosing to write their local law to trigger the state environmental law that other scholars said blocked housing construction. In another, the CALES data showed that state climate policy — often blamed for displacement — could not overcome the challenge of local exclusionary land use regulation.

Earlier this year O’Neill was able to use the data to explore the effects of recent state legislation that requires cities that aren’t meeting their housing production targets to approve “qualifying” affordable developments. Qualifying developments are those where a specified amount of the units are priced below market rate, where the proposed project will be built on parcels that are not environmentally sensitive and where they meet other special labor criteria.

“If they conform to all the city and state rules, you must say yes,” O’Neill said. “For those developments, you can no longer apply a discretionary local review process.”

The point of removing a locale’s discretion for otherwise compliant projects is to prevent well-organized — and well-heeled — neighbors from blocking affordable or mixed-income development by raising a ruckus at zoning and planning hearings, she said.

The work that led to last week’s eventful release began last fall, when California’s Department of Housing and Community Development launched an investigation into San Francisco’s land use policy and practices. The agency provided O’Neill a grant to expand CALES in San Francisco and analyze the data to identify barriers to housing approval and affordable housing construction. O’Neill was also tasked with checking to see whether San Francisco’s processes were consistent with California’s housing law, which requires cities to zone and plan to provide their fair share of affordable housing to the region. That law keeps home rule intact, but it asks cities to equitably spread both the burdens and the benefits of housing construction.

“The state’s newest changes to this area of housing law do more to task cities with revising local laws that have essentially walled off neighborhoods from multifamily housing, in order to relieve the burden on the neighborhoods that have carried the load for so long,” O’Neill said. “This is one of the ways cities create opportunities for social and economic mobility — by making sure that poor people aren’t concentrated in one part of the city.”

The report released last week showed how San Francisco has maneuvered around California’s housing law — which applies to its local zoning and planning law — through its local law, including a provision in its business and tax code. That provision requires discretionary review of all permits of any type.

“There is no proposal to do anything that is not subject to discretionary review,” O’Neill said. “If you want to do anything, even build a deck — there’s always the element of notification, and neighbors and ‘interested parties’ can just request a hearing on it.”

O’Neill calls it “process to an extreme.”

O’Neill and a team of researchers — which included Tim Dodson, a third-year UVA Law student — also looked at every detail of how San Francisco’s process unfolds in practice. Some of what she found came through the CALES data set. Other insights came in through interviews because informal conditions for approval were rarely referenced in hearing transcripts and documents.

“What developers, planners and housing advocates in the city shared is that the process allowed the city to impose conditions for approval that are not codified, that are not enumerated in writing, that are not predictable and that come up in between hearings,” O’Neill said. “That’s what people are reporting and it’s very hard to track whether the city is imposing conditions that are not allowed under state laws, because it’s happening outside of the formal public notice-and-hearing context.”

The research resulted in a 94-page academic report with statistical analyses, mapping and comparative charts. The biggest takeaway, O’Neill said, is that the housing approval process in San Francisco makes it hard to create any kind of new multifamily housing, affordable or otherwise.

“In other words, San Francisco is exclusionary — despite having inclusionary laws on paper, such as an inclusionary housing program, tenant protections, and a lot of land zoned for dense residential use compared to other cities,” she said.

This arduous process has meant it takes developers two years, on average, to get the initial green light for developments that already comply with all of San Francisco’s local law, or “code compliant” development. San Francisco then self-reports to the state that it takes another 605 days, on average, to get building permits for specific items like plumbing and electrical hookups. The unpredictable timeframes have driven some developers out of the market and deterred others from entering, she said.

The state is now mandating 18 specific actions the city must take, including eliminating the right of any individual to object to projects that comply with city rules and speeding up building permits once a project is approved. The state’s report also provides another 10 recommended actions.

According to the state report, if the city doesn’t make the required changes within the specified timeframes, California could withhold state funding and revoke local control over development in San Francisco.

While the San Francisco project had personal relevance for O’Neill, she said she hopes to be part of building a more equitable and sustainable future for Charlottesville, Albemarle and the South generally — a place where her husband, Malo Hutson, the dean of UVA’s School of Architecture, has family ties.

“I believe in research that helps local and state governments implement policy to tackle climate change and inequality — that’s everything I do in my research,” she said. “I love teaching land use law and state and local government law, because of how relevant it is to our daily lives. It may not be the area of law you think about first when you come to law school, but the fact is, your day-to-day experience is deeply impacted by state and local laws that affect your choice of schools, how you get to work and your ability to pay for your housing.”

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SF Fillmore’s Black Church buildings Hit by High quality-of-Life Disaster

Daily SF News — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 09:21:26 +0000

The pews are increasingly empty at historically Black churches in San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood, once called the “Harlem of the West” because of its bustling Black community.

Places of worship once visited by some of the country’s most influential Black leaders, such as W.E.B. Dubois and Martin Luther King Jr., have lost hundreds of members in recent years. As rising costs of living have kept many former Black residents away from a neighborhood they once helped build, many of the historic religious institutions that grew alongside them are on life support.

The 80-year-old Jones Memorial United Methodist Church on Post Street recently cut one of its Sunday sermons as its membership declined from roughly 200 people to 40, if you’re counting the choir members. Yulanda Williams, a lay minister at the church, said the congregation was forced to cut back programs for the sick and elderly as well as rehabilitation services for people leaving prison.

Sandy Lewis attends the Sunday service at Jones Memorial United Methodist on Sept. 10, 2023. | Source: Justin Katigbak/The Standard

At the historic 171-year-old Third Baptist Church on McAllister Street, which supports after-school programs for Black youth and food for the hungry, attendance has dropped from over 1,000 people in the 1970s to as low as 200 people now, said the Rev. Amos Brown.

Alongside the disappearance of Black churches, Black businesses have struggled to survive. Arnold Townsend, the pastor at Without Walls Ministries on Steiner Street, said he must drive to the East Bay after church every Sunday to find authentic soul food.

“To see these institutions disappear, you have to understand what it does to the emotional psyche of Black people,” Townsend said. “We have no identifiers in our town anymore.”

The struggles of San Francisco’s Black churches coincide with declining religious participation across the country. Some local religious leaders say it’s time for the institutions to reinvent themselves. Others blame city officials for failing to provide affordable housing for their members as well as protection from property crime and social issues like homelessness that plague San Francisco.

The Sunday service is sparsely attended at Jones Memorial United Methodist in San Francisco on Sept. 10, 2023. | Source: Justin Katigbak/The Standard

Some longtime members of Black churches in the Fillmore make lengthy commutes from other parts of the Bay Area, but many have found churches near their new homes or stopped attending church altogether. Some members have simply grown too old to attend, and the churches are struggling to attract younger congregants.

For Andrea Patton-Housley, a 30-year member of Jones United Methodist Church, the declining church membership has intensified her obligation to commute from the East Bay to the Fillmore every Sunday. Patton-Housley grew up in San Francisco and attended church here, but she moved to the East Bay in 2006 to buy a home because the city was unaffordable.

“The church is like my family,” Patton-Housely said. “There’s not that many African Americans left in the Bay Area.”

A Difficult Balance

San Francisco’s Black population decreased from 13.4% of the city’s total population in 1970 to 5.7% in 2021. The drug and housing crises have hit Black residents particularly hard, with Black people making up 38% of the city’s homeless population and 32% of overdose deaths, according to the most recent data available.

These disparities, some community leaders say, are symptomatic of the city’s failure to support Black institutions that were largely expected to address the crises.

“The church has been a lifeline to keep people from getting into trouble,” Williams said. “But how long are we expected to try and resolve issues that go far beyond our reach?”

Pastors say they’re faced with balancing spiritual obligations to help those in need and coming to terms with their own vulnerabilities. In response to a rise in break-ins, some churches in the Fillmore have moved away from open-door policies and have installed high-tech security systems.

A composite image shows a congregant paging through Ecclesiastes in the Bible, left, during a Sunday service at Third Baptist Church and a locked gate, right, along the exterior of Third Baptist Church on Sept. 7, 2023. | Source: Don Feria for The Standard; Justin Katigbak/The Standard

Brown, pastor of Third Baptist Church, said he’s spent upward of $75,000 to repair damaged property and install fences and cameras, expenses that have added to the financial woes presented by declining membership.

This year, thieves stole catalytic converters from vehicles in the church’s gated lot—one of three break-ins the church endured over the past six months.

Brown, who studied under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and is the president of San Francisco’s NAACP chapter, said he wants to see the law enforced evenly rather than not at all. He said he thinks the city fosters a climate that’s conducive to crime, placing undue burden on churches and businesses.

“The Black community is under siege,” Brown said. “The leadership of the city needs to step up and stop debating in ideological scum-fights.”

The Rev. Amos Brown stands among the pews for a portrait after services at the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco on Sept. 3, 2023. | Source: Don Feria for the Standard

Third Baptist operated a homeless shelter until its plumbing system was clogged by hypodermic needles, a problem that cost $50,000 to repair, Brown said. First Friendship Baptist on Steiner Street also ran a homeless shelter until declining membership made the operation unsustainable, according to Townsend.

Other churches in the area say they’ve struggled with increasing homelessness without having the resources to help. Between 2019 and 2022, the unsheltered homeless population in the Fillmore’s supervisorial district rose by roughly 160 people, though it remained much lower than in other areas of the city, according to a one-night count in February 2022.

Williams said the smell of urine has seeped into her church from homeless encampments on the adjacent sidewalk. Yul Dorn, pastor of Emmanuel Church-God in Christ on Hayes Street, said he’s caught people sneaking onto the church’s roof, using drugs and even sleeping there.

“I’ve never seen churches desecrated to the extent that I’m seeing today,” Williams said.

In the Tenderloin, the epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis, Glide Church—a hub for social justice in the neighborhood—is no stranger to the issues described by ministries of the Fillmore.

A composite image of the exterior of Glide Memorial Church, left, and Minister of Celebration Marvin K. White, right, at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco on Thursday, September 21, 2023. | Source: Jason Henry for The Standard

“It gets wild at Glide. I mean, yesterday, someone came in and threatened to kill everybody,” Senior Minister Marvin K. White said on Wednesday. “We acknowledge that it is a thing, but we also know that bringing folks together is part of the solution.”

White said two types of congregants come to his church on Sundays: One group attends for the sermon, while others attend for a free meal. He said he believes bringing those groups together should remain at the core of the church’s mission.

“Those who are privileged need to look at those people in the face who are suffering, and we all need to see each other,” White said.

Decades in the Making

The challenges for the Fillmore’s Black churches started well before the city’s current drug and homelessness crises.

In the 1960s, the Fillmore neighborhood was the focus of a federally authorized “urban renewal” project, which ostensibly aimed to improve struggling urban areas by building new housing and storefronts but forced an exodus from the area.

Homes and businesses line Fillmore Street at Sutter Street in October 1963. In the 1960s, the Fillmore neighborhood was the focus of a federally authorized “urban renewal” project, which ostensibly aimed to improve struggling urban areas by building new housing and storefronts but forced an exodus from the area. | Source: Courtesy OpenSFHistory

The Board of Supervisors is weighing recommendations set forth by a reparations committee, which is proposing investments in education and health for Black children and mothers, strategies to employ more Black teachers, psychiatric help for people growing up in underserved neighborhoods as well as cash payments for Black San Franciscans. But next steps for the proposals remain unclear.

Declining church attendance is hardly unique to Black churches or to San Francisco. Across the country, religious participation in churches has fallen over the past decade. The share of people who identify as Christian in the U.S. declined from 78% to 63% between 2007 and 2021, and only a quarter of people say they attend church at least once a week, according to a study by Pew Research.

The Bethel A.M.E. Church choir poses for a group portrait in San Francisco in 1929. Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, located in the Fillmore District, was founded in 1852 and was one of the earliest African American churches on the West Coast. | Source: Courtesy African American Museum & Library at Oakland

White, of Glide Church, said he’s begun to move away from the Bible in some of his sermons as a growing number of people separate themselves from religion. White said the church’s evolution will require meeting people where they are in their beliefs and working together with other ministries.

“I’m like Oprah. You get a theology. You get a theology. You get a theology,” he said. “I think part of my job as a minister. … Is to remove these barriers created by these dead white theologians.”

Minister of Celebration Marvin K. White at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco on Thursday, September 21, 2023. | Source: Jason Henry for The Standard

Bobby Sisk, a steward of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, said he considers his church one of the lucky ones, though attendance has decreased by roughly 60% since the 1970s. Sisk said he believes churches need to evolve and learn how to attract more diverse crowds and younger members in order to survive in San Francisco.

“The churches were thriving. These were packed houses to capacity. Now, in some cases, you have some that are on life support,” Sisk said. “The churches themselves have to start to think differently.”

Others say the city needs to provide more support to these institutions before Black people disappear entirely from the fabric of San Francisco.

“In 10 years, it’s quite possible that we could have more Black San Franciscans unhoused than housed,” Townsend said. “But it seems like mostly they want to ignore it and pretend that it’s not happening.”

The post SF Fillmore’s Black Church buildings Hit by High quality-of-Life Disaster appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco Drug Disaster Panel Hasn’t Met in Months

Daily SF News — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 16:07:18 +0000

A commission in charge of holding San Francisco accountable for its response to the drug and mental health crises hasn’t been able to hold a proper meeting for more than seven months as the city’s elected leaders neglect to fill its seats.

There are currently only six active members on the 17-person Behavioral Health Commission, an oversight body with the power to draft policy and conduct reviews of programs run by the city’s Behavioral Health Department. The department has a $592 million annual budget and is responsible for providing mental health and drug treatment services.

Because there are fewer than nine active members, the commission lacks a quorum and hasn’t been able to wield much of its power or hold meetings since February.

The term of the commission’s co-chair, Balham Vigil, expired 10 months ago, but Vigil continues to serve; the city has failed to appoint a replacement. The commission is required by state law, and 16 of its 17 members are appointed by the Board of Supervisors.

A 17th seat is reserved for a member of the Board of Supervisors. But that seat has sat empty since January 2022. Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who championed the creation of the Homelessness Oversight Commission, was the last Board of Supervisors member to fill the seat before Behavioral Health Commission members said he abruptly stopped attending. Safaí didn’t respond to a request for comment.

District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safai during the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Meeting at City Hall in San Francisco on July 11. | Source: Isaac Ceja/The Standard

“The supervisors are just not appointing people,” said former commission member Geoffrey Grier. “You’ve got a lot of folks who want to be on the commission but they’ve got to wait a year? Nine months?”

Victor Young, a clerk for the Board of Supervisors, told The Standard there are eight people who have pending applications to serve on the commission. However, he said it’s difficult to find qualified members for the commission due to the types of experience needed for each seat.

Each of the 11 supervisors gets one appointee to the commission. The six other seats are appointed by the full Board of Supervisors, including the one seat designated for a member of the Board of Supervisors.

On top of that, there are other complicated rules. At least nine of the 17 commissioners are supposed to be mental health patients or family members of mental health patients. Two commissioners are supposed to be mental health “advocates,” two seats are designated for mental health professionals, and one seat is to be held by a person “serving the public interest.”

The commission currently has three seats occupied by mental health patients or their family members, two mental health professionals and one advocate.

The Behavioral Health Department is part of the Department of Public Health, the largest department in the city with a $3 billion budget. The Department of Public Health has at least four commissions overseeing its work.

Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who is chair of the rules committee, which evaluates commission applicants, said he’s working on legislation that would shrink the commission from 17 members to 11. He told The Standard the commission’s stringent eligibility requirements have imposed barriers for him and other supervisors to appoint commissioners.

Supervisor Matt Dorsey speaks at a press conference in San Francisco on June 29. | Jeremy Chen/The Standard

Do Oversight Bodies Work? Some Supervisors Are Skeptical

In July, The Standard reported only one person working in City Hall was able to figure out how many departments, boards, commissions and advisory bodies the city has. A representative from the City Attorney’s Office eventually counted 53 departments, 56 boards and commissions, and 74 more advisory bodies, bringing the grand total to 183 different entities.

The revelation frustrated many who said the city is plagued by too many overlapping bureaucracies.

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who is one of five supervisors with active appointees on the Behavioral Health Commission, said the city should fill the vacant seats but was skeptical whether it would move the needle on solving city issues.

“If oversight bodies led to good government, we would have the best government in the world,” Mandelman said.

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman listens to public comment at a board meeting at the Supervisor’s Chamber at City Hall in San Francisco in May. | Justin Katigbak for The Standard.

Supervisor Catherine Stefani called the commission into question in April 2020 when she alleged the body’s nonprofit fiscal agent may have improperly submitted invoices for administrative costs and the salaries of two staff members. The commission seat holders are unpaid and the body has since moved under the fiscal purview of the health department.

Some commission members have taken issue with working under the health department, contending it threatens their ability to independently provide oversight.

“We’re being overseen by the department that we’re supposed to have oversight of,” Vigil said.

‘Lives Are at Risk’

The city is in the midst of an overdose crisis that’s claiming over two lives every day, according to preliminary data from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office. Meanwhile, people with mental illness cycle through the city’s hospitals and emergency services.

The Department of Public Health referred questions about the commission vacancies to the Board of Supervisors. Board President Aaron Peskin did not reply to a request for comment.

“They come out, dictate to us and leave,” commission member Liza Murawski said of the health department. “There’s no accountability.”

Murawski said she’s been awaiting data on the number of case managers in city-funded programs for several years, spending countless hours pleading with the department to no avail. She wants to know if the city has enough case managers to meet client demands and connect them with lifesaving services.

The commission is supposed to monitor contracts and outcomes of the city’s mental health services and report their findings to the Board of Supervisors and the state. However, commission members said the city’s reliance on nonprofit contractors has created a firewall that makes it impossible to obtain the data needed to evaluate the services.

In April, former commission member Terezie Bohrer resigned in an email to the clerk, explaining she thought she could be a better advocate “on the ‘outside’ with less governmental constraints.”

Others have accused the health department of being purposefully unhelpful in helping them obtain information necessary to do their jobs.

“They’ve been pretty much keeping us in the dark,” Vigil said. “People’s lives are at risk.”

The post San Francisco Drug Disaster Panel Hasn’t Met in Months appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

How Water Theft Exacerbates the World Water Disaster – Non Revenue Information

Daily SF News — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 14:40:00 +0000

Image credit: Photo by Amaan Ali on Unsplash

What does California have in common with Maharashtra—a western Indian state located halfway across the globe? Besides being home to two of the most prolific movie industries in the world, both states are also experiencing climate change in the extreme, their plight exacerbated by water theft.

While California was ravaged by wildfires and droughts in recent years, Maharashtra has experienced droughts and successive heat waves for over a decade. India has already witnessed four heat waves so far this year, with temperatures soaring over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in many parts of the country. To make it all worse, millions of gallons of water have been pillaged illegally in both of these increasingly vulnerable places.

In 2021, it was revealed that as much as 1.8 billion gallons of water had been stolen in California since 2013 by illegal cannabis growers among other thieves, by breaking into secure water stations, drilling into water lines, and tapping into fire hydrants, among other methods. All this water theft had an adverse impact not only on local agriculture but also on the lives and livelihoods of local communities.

While California was ravaged by wildfires and droughts in recent years, Maharashtra has experienced droughts and successive heat waves for over a decade.

In early 2022, California’s Central Valley water district experienced theft by its own former general manager. Over the course of 23 years, former general manager Dennis Falaschi stole $25 million worth of water. Aside from the widespread corruption and misuse of public funds, the Central Valley is one of the most water-strapped areas in the country. A similar operation involving water operators was brought to light by an activist in Mumbai, India’s financial capital and the capital city of Maharashtra.

India’s Water Theft Issue

Activist Sureshkumar Dhoka undertook a painstaking investigation, filing over one hundred applications under India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act, demanding information from public servants and government authorities about the groundwater in Mumbai. In the end, Dhoka found that over $9 million worth of water was extracted illegally from two wells located on the premises of just one decrepit building in South Mumbai.

The theft had taken place over 11 years, between 2006 and 2017. And even after police filed charges and arrested the accused in one case, water tankers continued drawing water from private borewells in and around the same neighborhood—and still do even today. This water theft is exacerbating the region’s water crisis, enabling the tanker operators to continue to profit from a situation they helped exacerbate.

Dhoka found that over $9 million worth of water was extracted illegally from two wells located on the premises of just one decrepit building in South Mumbai.According to the World Bank, “Come summer, and water becomes a commodity as precious as gold in India. The country has 18 percent of the world’s population, but only 4 percent of its water resources, making it among the most water-stressed in the world.”

The World Bank has helped to fund several water-related projects in India, the most recent being one worth $363 million, which will help provide water to two million rural households in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. The UN World Water Development Report 2023 paints a grim picture of the Global South, particularly India.

“The global urban population facing water scarcity is projected to increase from 933 million (one third of global urban population) in 2016 to 1.7–2.4 billion people (one third to nearly half of global urban population) in 2050, with India projected to be the most severely affected,” the report states.

If over $9 million worth of water can be extracted illegally from just two wells in one city, one can only imagine the nationwide figures.

Mumbai: Where Water Is a Privilege

Mumbai gets its water from nearby lakes such as Upper and Middle Vaitarna, Modak Sagar, Tansa, Bhatsa, Vihar, and Tulsi. But in the wake of successive heat waves, steadily diminishing water reserves, and the uncertainty of an adequate monsoon in an El Niño year, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has announced 10 percent water cuts starting July 1, 2023.

Water shortages enable private tanker operators to cash in on the crisis. For one tanker with 10,000 liters of water, private operators usually charge upwards of 1,200 rupees (approximately $15). In summer months, or during heat waves, given the higher demand, prices have been known to double, even triple, making them unaffordable for low-income families, who struggle to make even $200 a month.

South Mumbai’s Cuffe Parade area is where some of the city’s wealthiest people live. Yet just across the road are the low-income neighborhoods inhabited by their domestic staff, maids, drivers, nannies, and numerous others. The water shortage affected Cuffe Parade’s rich and poor differently. While the rich could still afford the services of water tanker operators, the poor have been left to the mercy of slumlords and their minions.

According to Manoj Podar, president of the Cuffe Parade Residents Association (CPRA) and long-time resident, water tankers come to supply water to buildings in the neighborhood year-round. These tankers supply non-potable water or water that cannot be used for drinking purposes. “Around seven to eight years ago, tanker operators charged as much as 15,000 to 20,000 rupees ($182 to $243) per tanker (of 10,000 liters capacity),” recalls Podar, which is extremely overpriced compared to the regular rate of 800 to 1,200 rupees ($9 to $15). But the residential high-rise buildings have negotiated annual rates with operators now, which helps keep them in line. “They don’t engage in any mischief,” Podar says, “because then they will lose business.”

Podar says the focus should be on finding solutions instead of blaming the municipal corporation, who are “doing their best despite limited resources.” It was because of the persistent efforts of the CPRA that the crisis has been mitigated somewhat today. Some buildings have installed rainwater harvesting mechanisms, others have installed aerators in taps to reduce the amount of water coming out of faucets and limit water leakage and waste. “We do regular plumbing checks and also educate people, especially domestic staff, to not leave the taps running when they work, to ensure water wastage is minimized,” says Podar.

But the story is very different in the low-income shanty town located behind the World Trade Centre, where Kamala and Vimala (names changed on request) live. Both women work as maids in the homes of their ultra-rich neighbors, but neither can make do with the meager supply of water from the local municipality, forcing both to pay for extra water.

Kamala is a widow in her mid-forties and a mother of three. Her eldest, a son, recently turned 18 and helps supplement the household income with odd jobs. Their combined income rarely exceeds $350 a month and is just enough to keep the roof over their heads, the food on the table, and the younger children in school.

“We get water for an hour and a half each afternoon, but that is not sufficient. No tanker operator comes this deep inside the slums, so we pay 500 rupees (approximately $6) per family to this man who controls the taps,” says Kamala, referring to a “water supplier” whom she refuses to name, fearing retaliation. “He supplies six extra gallons (22 liters) of water every day.”

Vimala is in her 50s and has a larger joint family of 13 people. She is one of the main sources of income for her family. “Because we have a larger family, we have to shell out 1,000 rupees (approximately $12) per month for 12 extra gallons of water per day,” she says. Vimala’s mother-in-law is old and ailing; her husband’s health is also declining. Her disabled brother-in-law also lives with them—and Vimala has five school-going grandchildren. None of them can work.

“My elder son and his wife run a small shop selling biscuits, soap, and a few other daily essentials. My younger son loads and unloads goods into and from trucks. I’m trying to get him a job as a driver. His wife also works as a maid,” she says, explaining how five people work together to feed 13. The family’s income varies from month to month.

Laws Bent and Broken

As per official records, there are over 19,000 wells in Mumbai—more than 12,000 of which are borewells, wells dug deep into the ground to tap into water-bearing soil or aquifers. Borewell water can only be used for domestic non-potable purposes. To extract water for commercial purposes in Mumbai, borewell owners must seek prior permission from the Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) and four different departments within the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

But as Sureshkumar Dhoka found, tanker operators and well owners often disregard all regulations. “Borewell owners often act in cahoots with water tanker operators, where they dig illegal wells and allow tanker operators to extract the water and sell it,” says Dhoka. “They don’t bother to take any permissions and operate like the mafia.” The 63-year-old single father of three became an activist out of desperation when his son, Ketan, caught dengue—a debilitating disease transmitted by mosquitoes—in 2016. Dhoka believes that the excessive mosquitos were exacerbated by the water tankers which would often leave still water for long periods of time which in turn would attract the insects.

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That same year, Dhoka filed a complaint with the National Green Tribunal (NGT), saying the dengue-causing mosquitoes were breeding on the premises of Pandya Mansion, where Dhoka was a tenant. He allegedly saw water tankers regularly filling water from two borewells there and even requested for the building’s managers to intervene, but his efforts fell on deaf ears.

“Building owners can only dig borewells and use the water from it for domestic purposes. If they sell this water to tanker operators, that makes it a commercial activity. I found that the [Pandya Mansion] building management had not obtained the requisite permissions for extraction of water for commercial purposes,” said Dhoka.

The law is clear when it comes to licenses and permissions for water extraction and transportation. Water tanker operators need licenses to transport water. But water extraction permission must be sought by the people on whose property the borewells are located. This is a tedious process, and as per a report in The Times of India, 99 percent of well owners engage in the illegal extraction of groundwater.

“I found that they were using motor pumps to extract the groundwater, so I sought information on the electricity consumption of all meters installed on the premises and discovered that two of them recorded unusually high amounts of electricity consumption, which could not be the case if they were used for ordinary domestic consumption,” said Dhoka. “The charges for electricity consumption for commercial purposes is much higher than that for domestic purposes. Thus, they had been cheating the electricity provider as well.”

In fact, based on information provided by Dhoka, the electricity provider fined 11 South Mumbai buildings 1,800,000 rupees (approximately $21,800) for illegally using domestic electricity meters instead of commercial meters to extract groundwater for selling to water tankers.

Law Enforcement Response

Dhoka findings led the Azad Maidan Police Station to file a First Information Report (FIR) against six accused persons for theft and wrongfully diverting water. The Economic Offenses Wing (EOW) of the Mumbai police conducted its own investigation and discovered that millions of dollars’ worth of water was pumped out over 11 years.

When the EOW team reached Pandya Mansion, they found that the illegal wells had been covered, in line with an order from the National Green Tribunal.

The chargesheet filed by the police stated that 761,856,600 rupees (approximately $9.2 million) worth of water was extracted by the accused. Six people were arrested. While five of them are out on bail now, one of the accused is now deceased. The trial has yet to begin.

An investigation of this magnitude requires coordination, not only between various branches of law enforcement agencies but also the cooperation of municipal authorities, other statutory bodies, and government authorities. At present, this proves to be a challenge, given the sheer size of the bureaucracy and the number of departments and officials involved. Both Dhoka and Nishith Mishra, Joint Commissioner of Police (EOW) agree that forming a Special Investigation Team (SIT) comprising police officers and officials from relevant agencies to specifically investigate the matter could help speed up the process of bringing the guilty to justice.

Today, it appears that the illegal water extraction operation at Pandya Mansion stopped after the BMC canceled the long-term (999-year) lease to the alleged offenders in the case. In addition, the wells had been sealed shut, in compliance with an order from the NGT in response to Dhoka’s 2016 complaint.

There are many more such filling points across South Mumbai; their location is often given away by the ubiquitous green pipes that are tied up or pushed to one side of the road when not in use. Though some have requisite permissions, most don’t.

Water Tanker Operators Oppose New Guidelines

In the wake of Dhoka’s revelations about groundwater theft and the subsequent police investigation, the Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) issued guidelines for bulk water supply by water tanker operators. These guidelines were to be implemented by groundwater regulatory authorities in every state. In Maharashtra, the responsibility fell upon the Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority (MWRRA).

The guidelines require tanker operators to obtain appropriate permissions and licenses and renew them regularly. There are also provisions for action if the guidelines are violated.

The BMC started issuing notices to water tanker operators who were found to be disregarding these guidelines, and police started filing against them.

But the MWRRA has been unable to fully implement the CGWA guidelines, in part because political parties seldom want to go up against water tanker operators, as any reduction in water supply to their constituents could affect their votes. The Mumbai Water Tanker Association (MWTA) went on strike in February this year and relented only after the deputy chief minister intervened, promising to seek to relax the guidelines.

Instances of water theft have been reported from many other parts of the world, including in the United States, but mainly in the Global South.

Water Theft and Management Globally

Mumbai isn’t the only city grappling with a water crisis.

This summer has been particularly harsh in India’s capital city of New Delhi, where according to a report by India Today, major hospitals faced water shortages. Even the national Parliament, the residences of the president and the prime minister, the Supreme Court of India, and the Delhi High Court were not spared.

Meanwhile, in Bengaluru (Bangalore), an investigation by The Hindu newspaper revealed that tanker operators were stealing water from nearby villages like Ramagodanahalli to supply wealthy residents of Whitefield. These water supply agents had dug 25 to 30 borewells in the village, from which as many as 120 to 130 water tankers drew water every day, causing the water table to drop significantly.

Water theft is often hard to detect and time consuming to investigate and prosecute. Like Mumbai’s ongoing case, California officials have been trying since 2015 to prosecute G. Scott Fahey, owner of Sugar Pine Spring Water, who was siphoning water from a small tributary that is connected to the Hetch Hetchy reservoir—where San Francisco gets most of its water—for close to a decade. Despite state governments like California’s clamping down on water usage and tightening regulations, water managers don’t have the resources to fully monitor all violations and enforce laws. Enforcement is limited and punishment does not fully deter violators. “Just like the IRS doesn’t audit every single taxpayer, we do not conduct a detailed enforcement investigation into tens of thousands of water rights,” said Ailene Voisin, a spokesperson for the state’s Water Resources Control Board, in an interview for Grist.

Instances of water theft have been reported from many other parts of the world, including in the United States, but mainly in the Global South, including Mexico, Chile, Kenya, and Pakistan. According to UNESCO’s UN World Water Development Report 2023, some countries could lose as much as six percent of their GDP due to water scarcity. This could create greater turmoil in regions that bear an unequal burden of the impact of climate change, and spur migration and conflict far beyond their borders.

While instances of water theft in the United States are currently relatively rare, the problem—as with all climate issues—is ultimately global. As water becomes scarcer worldwide, we can learn from India and California as bellwethers and take preventive measures at home: we need more robust water management policies, including stringent legal provisions to prevent water theft and stronger political will to implement such laws. Otherwise, we face a future where only the rich or corrupt can afford access to water.

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Couple strikes into ADU behind dad and mom’ residence in housing disaster

Daily SF News — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 13:31:46 +0000

On a quiet cul de sac in suburban Los Angeles, the installation of Martin Guevara and Grace Kuo’s prefab accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, caused quite a stir in the neighborhood.

“It was like a block party,” said Guevara, 68. “All of our neighbors came out to watch.”

Guevara was referring to a prefab ADU designed and built by Villa Homes; the 850-square-foot home was craned over the couple’s existing home and placed into position in their backyard in the South Bay last year.

“It was in two halves,” said his daughter Melanie Guevara, 33, who lives in the ADU behind her childhood home with husband Devon Hollowood, 34. “It was already outfitted, including the appliances.”

“We were thinking, ‘Please don’t drop our house,’” Hollowood said with a laugh.

One half of the prefab ADU is installed on the Guevara-Kuos’ property in August 2022.

(Devon Hollowood )

Despite the addition of an ADU, there is still room to garden. The couple hope to add an outdoor dining area in the future.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

Like many people who chose to pack up and move during the COVID-19 pandemic, the couple were living in a rental house in Hawaii for three months with Melanie’s brother and his girlfriend. That’s when they had the idea for the ADU.

Melanie had just graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Optometry and Hollowood, a software engineer for Google, was working remotely in San Francisco after receiving his PhD in physics at UC Santa Cruz. While on Oahu, they considered their next steps, including where to live.

The light-filled ADU includes a full kitchen with an island the couple can use for entertaining.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

“In Oahu, many people had ohana suites in back of their homes for family or to rent,” Melanie said, referring to small family dwellings similar to ADUs. “Initially, I thought we could live in a little house and travel. That was the original genesis for the ADU — instead of having to rent something that’s not ours. That was my floating-in-the-ocean fantasy.”

Hollowood, who also loves to travel, took a more businesslike approach. “We were trying to dodge the housing crisis,” said Hollowood, who grew up in Walnut Creek. “We couldn’t afford anything. We didn’t have money for a down payment. But we wanted our own place and didn’t want to waste money on rent. We thought we could move into a backyard unit as a starter home.”

Guevara and Kuo, both optometrists, purchased their 1,300-square-foot home for $300,000 in 1995 and were empathetic to their daughter and son-in-law’s struggle to find housing.

With mortgage rates low in 2021, building an ADU versus the cost of rent “just made so much sense financially,” Guevara said. “And, of course, we loved the idea of them being close to us.”

Today, however, owning a home is a bigger challenge for SoCal millennials and Gen Zers, with mortgage rates at their highest level since 2002 and the median home price in Los Angeles nearing $1 million. This has left some younger people believing they will never own a home.

“So many people of our generation have student loan debt and can’t afford to buy a house,” Melanie said. “When you hear them talking about not having kids, that is partly why.”

The full kitchen features a cozy window seat. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The striking changes in the housing market were not lost on longtime homeowners Guevara and Kuo, who viewed the ADU as a sound investment in a shaky financial market. “We have lived in this house for 28 years, so we could finance the ADU quickly,” Kuo said. “The ADU cost more than our house when we bought it.”

While waiting for her optometrist license, Melanie researched options in Los Angeles. She contacted several ADU companies, including Villa, which offers 10 models ranging from 440 to 1,200 square feet. After an initial video consultation, she learned that a custom 850-square-foot prefab ADU would cost $475,000, roughly $100,000 less than the bids they had received from local contractors.

The ADU is spacious enough for bookshelves.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The couple liked that the designs were preapproved and that the company handled all the permitting and project management.

After they worked on the design — their particular home model is no longer available — Villa poured the foundation, and the house was trucked in and installed in the backyard by crane. Next, Villa added flooring, installed cement board siding, painted, stitched the two halves together and hooked up the various utilities.

The interiors of the ADU are sunny and bright, with a living room, two bedrooms and two baths, a laundry, a full kitchen and a cozy window seat. There is room for a small dining room table and storage in the IKEA sectional. The second bedroom can be used for guests and gives Hollowood space to work from home twice a week.

In the living room, the couple can store items in their sectional.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The family shares the backyard and enjoys gardening together, yet there is a sense of privacy thanks to the orientation of the homes.

James Connolly, co-founder and chief executive of Villa, said he was drawn to ADU manufacturing after trying to help his mother install an ADU in Northern California. “It was difficult, but I thought the concept was promising,” Connolly said. The advantage to prefab, he said, is that it is “more affordable, faster, cheaper and a more efficient use of materials.”

Connolly grew up in the Bay Area, where many of his childhood friends had been displaced by the cost of housing. “My parents bought a house for $225,000 when I was 4; by the time I graduated from UC Berkeley, it was worth about a million dollars,” he said. “Income opportunities, unfortunately, did not keep up, and it became impossible for my generation to buy a home. Eighty percent to 90% of the kids I grew up with were displaced. It was tearing families and communities apart.”

When the laws passed in 2020 making it easier for homeowners to convert garages into ADUs, Connolly said he saw it as an opportunity to help solve the housing crisis.

The exterior of the 850-square-foot prefab ADU. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

What Connolly finds most exciting about ADUs is their potential to keep families close. At a time when Los Angeles is experiencing a housing shortage, Connolly points out, “I believe that this multigenerational living theme is something that Americans will adopt moving forward, more like our international peers. It will be better for families. Everyone deserves to have a place that they can call home.”

Living at home for the first time since she was 18 has been an adjustment, but Melanie enjoys being near her parents. Past and present collide on the 8,400-square-foot lot, where the family members can “keep an eye on each other,” said Kuo, 64. “We cook dinner together, and Bud [Martin] and Devon often host movie nights in the living room of the ADU.”

Details inside the guest bathroom of the 850-square-foot prefab ADU. The guest bedroom also serves as an office for Hollowood, who works from home twice a week. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The young couple paid a quarter of the cost of the ADU and plan to pay the mortgage as rent. Hoping to have children one day, they don’t see themselves living in the ADU indefinitely. However, that doesn’t worry Guevara and Kuo, who said they can use it for other family members who need housing.

The family is happy with the result of the ADU despite supply chain issues and a long wait for permits to be approved, even with the assistance of Villa.

The master bedroom inside the ADU.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s a huge life upgrade,” Melanie said. “And we can interact with my parents as much or as little as we like.”

“We’ve never lived anywhere bigger than this,” Hollowood added. “It’s perfect for the two of us.”

“We’ve never lived anywhere bigger than this,” Devon Hollowood said, with wife Melanie Guevara. “It’s perfect for the two of us.”

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

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Iconic Venice Seaside boardwalk continues to be occupied by homeless teams throughout spiraling disaster

Daily SF News — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 05:07:46 +0000

News

By Marjorie Hernandez and Matthew Sedacca

Published
July 15, 2023

Updated
July 15, 2023, 2:25 p.m. ET

Authorities in California have ceded prime real estate on the Venice Beach boardwalk to a rotating cast of vagrants — a microcosm of the insanity plaguing the Golden State amid its spiraling homeless crisis.

For weeks, a vagrant surrounded himself beneath a pagoda along with boardwalk with a dump of grimy grocery carts, tarps and blankets, galling footage posted online showed. He and a friend reportedly rejected aid from police, city workers and LA County Park Rangers — who threw up their hands and let the beachfront takeover persist.

As online outrage grew, Los Angeles cops finally cleared the beach bum this week, only to have a different hobo immediately take over the spot — and all but shut-out taxpaying residents or tourists from enjoying it.

“It’s like they are babysitting [the homeless population],” Reza Karimi, 60, owner of the sunglasses store Good See Co., and whose prime location on the boardwalk is just steps away from the hobo-filled pagodas, told The Post.

“Here I pay taxes, I work every day, but these people are given money for free and yet they still do whatever they want and ruin the city.”

Scott Beers, who took over the primo real estate with his girlfriend, promised to keep it cleaner than the previous “tenant.”

Scott Beers and his girlfriend took over the pagoda after authorities cleared a vagrant who had previously trashed the space.Ringo Chiu

“He had tents up and trashed this whole area up. You can’t have that here,” said Beers, 57.

“I’ve had homes before so I get it,” said Beers, who keeps his belongings neatly stacked on an airport luggage cart. “These people pay millions of dollars to live by the beach and they don’t want to see that s–t all over the place.”

Beers, who claims to have abandoned a 28-acre cattle ranch and dairy farm in Nevada for life on the streets following his wife’s death, sang the praises of the free services available in the beachside community.

“Venice is my favorite because you can get hot showers every day. You can go out to the food bank three days a week. There is a church nearby that gives you a hot meal. And you can’t beat the views!” he said, noting that he gets by with panhandling and $221 a month from “general relief” funds from the Welfare Office.

The persistence of homeless encampments in Venice Beach and along the boardwalk has outraged locals and business owners.Ringo Chiu

Bums sang the praises of the free services available in the beachside community. Ringo Chiu

Locals ripped the game of beach bum whack-a-mole.

“People [who have been previously removed] have come back and sleep out on the beach and the boardwalk,” said Jessica, whose family has run a business on the boardwalk for decades.

“The tourists do get scared. They see people screaming or acting out near the shop and they turn around and don’t want to come back.”

California has 171,000 homeless people, representing 30% of the nation’s entire homeless population, according to a June report by the University of California, San Francisco.

171,000 people are homeless across California.Ringo Chiu

At the height of the pandemic, the city conducted a massive sweep in 2021, busting up by some counts nearly 200 tents on the boardwalk.

The city’s new mayor, Karen Bass, has also cracked down on encampments as part of her “Inside Safe” initiative launched earlier this year, which aims to connect homeless people with shelters and housing.

“What we see on our streets cannot continue to be normalized,” said Councilwoman Traci Park, who represents Venice Beach. “I will continue to address the homelessness crisis with dignity and compassion, and fight for the safety and wellbeing of everyone.”

LAPD and the mayor’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Newsom Faucets California Freeway Patrol, Nationwide Guard to Combat San Francisco’s Fentanyl Disaster

Daily SF News — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 22:00:20 +0000

The proclamation Friday was reminiscent of Breed’s bold claim in 2021 that the city would crack down on the “bulls— that has destroyed our city,” which she said in announcing an emergency plan to address the drug and overdose crisis in the Tenderloin.

That effort brought together multiple city agencies to ramp up enforcement of dealing, clear sidewalks and offer new public health responses to drug use such as opening what became a supervised consumption site called the Tenderloin Center.

The facility closed at the end of 2022, a few months after Newsom vetoed legislation that would have allowed San Francisco, Los Angeles and Oakland to pilot safe consumption sites. Breed said the plan was only meant to be temporary and, on Friday, added the center “didn’t quite work out.”

Residents wait in line to get into the Tenderloin Linkage Center (also known as the Tenderloin Center), a now-defunct safe consumption site in San Francisco, on Feb. 8, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

After the closing of the Tenderloin Center and the emergency plan’s winding down, overdose rates have again increased in 2023, data from the Office of the Medical Examiner shows.

Meanwhile, public safety advocates applauded the governor’s decision to increase law enforcement around the issue, at a time when the San Francisco Police Department is struggling to recruit and retain a full workforce.

“Just the mere presence of our officers we believe will help deter and disrupt criminal activity,” Duryee said.

Newsom said that his plan “will not seek to criminalize those struggling with substance use and instead focus on disrupting the supply fueling the fentanyl crisis by holding drug suppliers and traffickers accountable,” according to a press release on the plan.

But addiction experts and advocates for people who use drugs say the move could nonetheless have unintended consequences, and negatively affect people who struggle with addiction and lack access to housing, health care or other support systems.

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Opinion | Burning Man Is All the time a Disaster. However Burners Like Me Know This Time Is Completely different.

Daily SF News — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 10:24:52 +0000

Every time I go to Burning Man, there comes a moment when I ask myself, “Why did I choose this blazing, grueling workation when I could be back home, or on the beach?” By the end of the event, the answer is always clear — because there is nothing like it, anywhere on Earth.

The past two years, I’ve asked myself that question more times than in all the years before. I can see Burning Man — a gathering of more than 70,000 people in a sere and beautiful northwestern Nevada desert full of art and music and foolishness and delight — headed for the climate emergency’s cliff edge. It may not move, it may not end, but it will change.

Then again, so will everything else.

This year started off as one for the history books. My wife and I arrived Aug. 25, two days before the official opening, to perfect weather: hardly a gust of wind, good temperatures and a “playa” — the dry lake bed of fine, alkaline dust where Burning Man takes place — that was hard-packed and the air free from the usual choking particulates. I know that the conditions were thanks to rare storms that hit the week before we started work on our public art and theme camps to welcome the rest of the participants.

Obviously, the weather at the ending was also one for the history books — for very different reasons. Not only did we get more heavy rains, compounding rarity upon rarity, but they arrived at the worst possible time, near the end of the event, when everyone’s supplies of food, water and fuel were low.

The storm turned the playa’s microscopic dust into a bedeviling clay that mired everything in clinging mud. Just walking was a challenge: The mud stuck to your shoes and turned your feet into tragicomic irregular spheres that grew heavier with each step. Worse, all this movement churned up the playa, marring the surface and creating pockmarks that retained water, slowing the drying out and stranding attendees for longer.

Though such rainstorms are all but unheard-of, harsh weather at Burning Man is absolutely normal. I’ve been caught in at least one white-out dust storm every year. This is how the playa teaches patience. Whatever pleasurable thing you find yourself doing is every bit as fun as the thing you were planning to do, so enjoy it.

This is how the playa teaches solidarity. The ultrafine dust infiltrates every bearing of every machine. The gusting winds blow over shelters and tear reinforced grommets. Your goggles break and the blowing, burning dust gets into your eyes. You help your neighbors. Your neighbors help you. The “radical self-reliance” of Burning Man isn’t the final word — it is counterpart to the event’s “radical inclusion.”

And Burning Man attracts some of the most resourceful, competent, imaginative people you’re likely to meet. Our small camp had no fewer than four MacGyvers: people who can do carpentry, plumbing and electrical work, as well as generator and small-engine maintenance and repair, network administration and first aid. (We also had two M.D.s.)

So when the rains hit, everyone started figuring out contingencies and then contingencies for those contingencies. We duct-taped gallon Ziploc bags around our stocking feet (wet playa mud doesn’t stick to the slick plastic) or just went about in socks (ditto, though protracted contact with the alkaline mud causes painful skin reactions). We checked in with our neighbors, improvised ways to deal with water pooling on our flat shade-structure roofs and heated up our most perishable leftovers (14-hour slow-cooked pulled pork).

All the things we’d expected to do were canceled. Time to find something to enjoy that would be every bit as great as our canceled plans and enjoy it. A camp like mine, where a few dozen friends have gathered for a quarter-century, was the best place imaginable to get stuck in the mud.

In keeping with this year’s “Animalia” theme, some of my campmates had devised an “interspecies wedding” service, where participants filled in a Mad Libs-style questionnaire in whiteboard marker, creating wedding vows. We provided veils and headbands festooned with animal ears and stood couples under our beautiful light-up metal gate and performed a silly service, with the pair performing animal courting rituals to specification. (For example, if you chose “mouse,” we asked you to improvise the distinctive, high-pitched song that mice use to attract a mate.)

We performed many weddings during the week, and the tempo actually picked up after the rains started. Couples stopped in, enjoyed a muddy wedding and moved on.

But the rains continued. It was cold. Our shelters leaked and water came up through the floors. We fought back with more inclusivity and resourcefulness: We hung stuff up to dry, got tarps under our beds, lifted things into vehicles or under shelters. We checked in on our neighbors. We used some of our fuel to play dance music out of the LED Zeppelin art-car’s excellent speakers. We danced. So did the bag-footed people on their way to the rapidly filling port-a-potties. When we turned off the music, our across-the-street neighbors switched on their sound. The dancing continued.

But making the best of a bad situation doesn’t make it good. I left the playa late on Saturday. Two of my campmates were quite sick, and one of them had a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Medics told us we should go if we could to keep beds available for sicker people. I offered to help with the driving. My wife stayed behind to get our car home and to help with the all-hands, intensive leave-no-trace sweep of the site for even the smallest bit of MOOP (“Matter Out of Place”) that is the last thing we do before leaving every year. The roads and the gate have reopened, and my wife was heading out Tuesday, joining the “exodus” queue that is long even by Burning Man standards, with the usual three days’ worth of departures crammed into one.

Two consecutive years of brutal weather — one ferociously hot, one miserably wet — has many burners (including me) rethinking our attendance. It’s hard enough to prepare for all the contingencies of a hot, dry desert. Throw in water and mud and the contingencies multiply into towering, demoralizing heaps.

Burning Man started off as a small midsummer gathering on a San Francisco beach — but it spoke to something, and the crowds grew and grew, until the informal event turned into this 70,000-person annual desert camp-out. The Black Rock Desert is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and the contrast between the harsh environment and the art, food, dancing and fun made it an unforgettable, uniquely wonderful experience. After last year’s brutal conditions, that texture grew too rough for many of us, and there was lots of talk about whether the event would move again — whether the Black Rock Desert had tipped from “nearly totally unsuitable for human habitation” to “unsurvivable.” It won’t be the last place we lose.

The world is getting more and more unpredictable. Nothing is going according to plan. When the heavy weather hits, you’ve got to hunker down, share your snacks and pass around your flask, take care of one another, and find a way to enjoy the thing you must do, because the thing you wanted to do was just canceled. Again.

We’re all going to have to learn some MacGyver skills. We’re all going to have to cultivate patience and solidarity. And the organizers? They’re going to have to figure out how to keep the port-a-potties clear, because radical self-reliance and radical inclusion go only so far.

Cory Doctorow is the author of the newsletter Pluralistic.net and of “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.”

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