SAN FRANCISCO — For Zuleima Bolio and her husband, their RV parked on Bernal Heights Boulevard has been their temporary home for the past five months, but that could soon change.

They decided to move into the RV after facing high rental costs and the challenge of housing their puppies.

“We have a few puppies and the apartment we rented wanted a lot of money for them. So we saw that it would be a little better to move here instead of paying almost $3,000 for the two of us and the three puppies,” Bolio explains.

Despite her efforts to make ends meet by working locally, it was difficult to provide proof of sufficient income for a new apartment. Given the city's plans to address street safety and public health in the area, Bolio and her husband are now forced to consider a move.

“Well, now it’s our turn to think about where to move. We have the idea of ​​possibly moving to South San Francisco, but we still don’t know,” Bolio said.

Residents like Mark, a longtime Bernal Heights resident, are calling for the city to take action because of the increasing number of RVs in the area.

“They are very nice people, but they have been here for four years. There is nowhere for them to shower. They throw away their garbage. “You shouldn’t treat them like that,” Mark said.

Since 2020, the city has received complaints about the increasing presence of RVs, which have been exacerbated by the pandemic. In recent months, conditions in the area have continued to deteriorate, prompting calls for enforcement action.

The city's response includes reinstalling signs designating the area as a no-parking zone. Active enforcement actions are scheduled to begin on March 28. The mayor's office has also raised concerns about illegal dumping of waste, including wastewater, underscoring the urgency to address public health risks.

“People go out here all the time to pee, and further down the hill they go along the public garden,” Mark explained.

The attempt to enforce regulations has caused a divide within the community, with some expressing support for the measure while others expressing concerns about compassion for those affected.

“Many people are for it and others are against it. This is because they say some are good people and others are evil, but the truth is that with these new characters it seems perfect to me. Although many cars have not yet moved, “said Nelly Caceres, a long-time employee in the area.

Despite the uncertainties ahead, Bolio remains confident and emphasizes the need for mutual understanding and cooperation.

“If we bother them at any point, they can just tell us and we will see what to do because at the end of the day we are all human beings and we are in this together,” Bolio concluded.

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Business

By Eric Revell , Fox Business

Published
July 31, 2023

Updated
July 31, 2023, 1:23 a.m. ET

Billionaire Elon Musk says Twitter – the social media company he is in the midst of rebranding as “X” – will keep its headquarters in San Francisco despite the “doom loop” the city is facing as big-name businesses head for the exits.

Musk, who led a group of investors in acquiring Twitter that took the company private in a $44 billion deal last year, tweeted Saturday that the company’s headquarters will remain in San Francisco despite receiving offers aimed at enticing the company to relocate.

“Many have offered rich incentives for X (fka Twitter) to move its HQ out of San Francisco. Moreover, the city is in a doom spiral with one company after another left or leaving. Therefore, they expect X will move too. We will not,” Musk explained.

“You only know who your real friends are when the chips are down. San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend,” Musk’s tweet concluded.

Elon Musk says the company’s HQ will remain in San Francisco despite the city facing a “doom spiral.” Getty Images

San Francisco’s economy has suffered from an exodus of businesses and residents in the last few years, creating a “doom loop” in which a local government enters a downward fiscal spiral as its tax base declines.

An urban doom loop involves a decline in workers present in offices in city centers, which results in businesses shrinking their office footprint and rental overhead.

The decline in demand causes real estate prices to fall, which in turn reduces property tax revenue while other sources of tax revenue, like sales tax, also take a hit due to the reduced traffic in downtown areas.

Workers install a large X on the roof of the former Twitter headquarters on July 28, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Getty Images

As the overall tax base declines, it becomes harder for city governments to fund public services like law enforcement as they’re forced to make trade-offs that include things like budget cuts or tax hikes to stabilize their finances – both of which can drive more businesses and residents to depart if those policies have a negative effect on the economic climate or overall quality of life.

The growing popularity of remote work has accelerated that trend, decreasing the number of workers heading to the office on a daily basis as it becomes easier than ever for workers to live in suburban and rural areas without commuting.

The tech-heavy economy of San Francisco and criticisms of the city government’s record on public safety issues have made it a case study in the dynamics that drive urban doom loops.

Twitter is transitioning from its bird logo to a new brand based on the letter X. Getty Images

According to data from the Census Bureau, the population of San Francisco County declined by 7.5% from April 1, 2020, to July 1, 2022.

Commercial real estate firm CBRE released data in early July that showed that San Francisco had an overall office vacancy rate of 31.6% in the second quarter of 2023.

The CBRE report noted that in the last quarter “negative net absorption accelerated due to slow leasing activity, combined with a high volume of lease expirations and several new sublease listings.

This resulted in 1.83 million sq. ft. of occupancy loss, which increased the market-wide vacancy rate from 29.4% to 31.6%.”

Although Twitter isn’t relocating its headquarters, the company has sought to shrink its office footprint in San Francisco and faced a lawsuit from its landlord earlier this year over unpaid rent – although the social media company has faced similar suits at offices in Denver, Oakland and London since Musk acquired Twitter and began a broad cost-cutting push to stabilize its finances.

Amid Twitter’s rebrand to X, city officials filed a complaint and opened an investigation into whether the company had the proper permits to install an illuminated “X” atop its downtown headquarters.

Police had stopped the installation last week but later said there was a “misunderstanding” and that the incident was not a police matter.

City officials say a permit is required to change letters or signs on buildings or to erect a new sign on top of a building.

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(The Center Square) – The San Francisco Unified School District is projecting general fund deficits ranging from $25.3 million to $37.6 million over the next three years while facing a significant decline in enrollment.

That’s according to documents the school board received in its Aug. 29 meeting. The district general fund expenditures are $744 million in the 2023-24 school year. The deficits run from 2023-24 through 2025-26.

“Additional investments, including salary increases, will not be feasible within the District’s financial means,” the report stated.

The district is facing a staffing shortage in many different departments, the report stated.

In 2022-23, 15% of classrooms were staffed by substitute teachers or teachers on special assignment. This was also the case for the start of the 2023-24 school year.

Custodial Services and Student Nutritional Services departments had a 25% staffing shortage. The Buildings & Grounds department had a 50% staffing shortage in its heating and ventilation shop.

According to the report, the increase in vacant positions in classrooms is primarily due to the compensation schedule and insufficient incentives for long-term teacher retention.

The current average starting salary for a teacher is $64,000. The average teacher salary increases to $90,000 in mid-career, with the highest reported salary being $110,000.

Enrollment fell by over 4,000 students over the past decade, from 52,989 students in 2012-13 to 48,907 in 2022-23.

The district is also expecting an additional loss of 4,600 students by 2032.

The district did not respond to a request seeking comment.

The post San Fran faculties going through multi-million greenback deficits with decreased enrollment | appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The trial of a San Francisco police officer charged with involuntary manslaughter for shooting dead a man on the victim’s doorstep, which eventually led to his death several years later, continues in September when prosecutors are expected to find evidence in the victim’s home case will be presented.

The case of officer Kenneth Cha, whose preliminary hearing will be held on September 6, is the latest of three such counts of force charged by former prosecutor Chesa Boudin. The other two cases were dismissed.

The case revolves around Cha’s shooting death of Sean Moore in the Ocean View neighborhood in 2017. Moore was shot and killed on his doorstep by Cha but did not die until three years later from injuries sustained in the shooting.

The incident marked the first time in San Francisco that a police shooting was captured with a body-worn camera. Later that same year, Cha shot and killed a man armed with a knife at a Subway restaurant on Market Street.

“I hope the prosecutor sets a date for the preliminary investigation,” said Rebeca Young, who is representing the victim’s family.

Moore’s brother expressed relief that the long-delayed case is finally moving forward.

“This case has been going on for so long; It kind of took a toll on my mom,” said Ken Blackmon.

Sean Moore can be seen on the steps of his home in a still bodycam captured by the San Francisco Police Department before he was shot by Kenneth Cha. | Courtesy of SFPD

Moore, who suffered from mental health issues that may have played a role in his interaction with Cha, died in 2020 while serving time in San Quentin State Prison for an unrelated incident. Cha was charged with involuntary manslaughter by then-district attorney Boudin in 2021.

In July 2022, the case was taken over by a new assistant district attorney after Jenkins was appointed prosecutor following Boudin’s recall. Several delays in the case followed.

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When Mike Peters sat down to play a Seventh Seal-serious game of chess with Death back in 1986, the Alarm singer imagined a clear winner standing up from the table at some point. But his bout with CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia) still drags on, his opponent more like William Sadler’s Bergman-spoofing Grim Reaper from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, who—after each embarrassing Clue, Twister, and Battleship loss to two stoners—keeps demanding “Best two out of three!,” then “Best three out of five!” So his decision was inevitable, really—why not make art out of the prolonged ordeal (which had been compounded by his wife Jules’s simultaneous breast cancer diagnosis last year), via The Alarm’s new Forwards volley, a mortality-minded concept album written—and even partially-recorded—during long life-saving leukemia treatments in a local Welsh hospital.

The set is a soul-stirring career high for Peters, who won this latest round and transmuted base-metal suffering into anthemic gold on the opening title track, which peals with The Alarm’s classic amplified-acoustic-guitar assault, and tumbles into a faith-centric “The Returning,” stadium-huge “Another Way,” a punky “Next” (with the telling admission, “Whatever’s trying to get me/ Makes me feel alive”), and a rose-windowed chiming cathedral, “Transition,” that’s something of a mission statement; Peters, in his charismatic vocal rasp, declare that he really wants to live, and he’ll do whatever’s necessary to achieve that goal. Two socio-political commentaries close out the disc—“New Standards” and “X”, but somehow, all 10 tracks together roil with the same fervent spirit as the band’s definitive 1984 debut on IRS Records, Declaration, and its signature hits “Marching On,” “Blaze of Glory,” and “Sixty Eight Guns.”

But for a while, once Peters’s condition recurred in September of last year, it looked like Death might wind up winning. But so far, knock wood, the 64-year old sighs, he’s in remission again and plotting the band’s next tour with velvet-glove care. “So at the moment, I’m mindful of what I can do, because I’m still having treatments every two weeks,” says the artist, who still plans to maintain Coloursound, his side project with Cult guitarist Billy Duffy; he also oversees his Love Hope Strength charity, and an annual Welsh music festival dubbed The Gathering that he first launched in 1993. “And they keep ‘em two weeks apart in case I react to one, so they’ll know which one is causing the reaction. So I’m hoping I can push those weeks apart, which would give me a three-week break, and I could come to America and play ten or twelve dates in that time and not tax myself too much.” But maybe it’s the karmic kickback from all of the man’s generous charity work that helped him and his wife overcome this latest close call.

Peters also leases a block of waterfall-adjacent apartments in his scenic hometown of Dyserth, alongside a restaurant, hotel, even a yoga studio, plus his own personal recording studio where he and Duffy are planning a dramatic change for the next Coloursound effort. “Maybe it’s time to go Goth, after all this life and death stuff I’ve been through,” he reveals. “And we could hire Sisters of Mercy’s drum machine, Doktor Avalanche!” And it certainly beats another chess match with Death….

Paste: You and I talked right at the beginning of the pandemic, and everything seemed fine. So which happened first after that—your being diagnosed with pneumonia, or the recurrence of your CLL?

Mike Peters: I think it all started going out of control during the pandemic, because of the isolation rules that were in place. I couldn’t go to the hospital, and I never got to see my doctor. I still haven’t seen my main hematologist for four years! And things went out of control, so obviously the stats weren’t quite revealing until I had a face-to-face meeting, and by then it was discovered that I had the pneumonia, and the pneumonia really kicked off the leukemia again, and my lungs filled with blood, and I ended up in a very critical position, really. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it out alive, but I did, so I’m grateful for that. But yeah—I think the pandemic really disrupted everything, in terms of my medical and health situation.

Paste: And from outside appearances, it seemed like you were staying busy.

Peters: I was! Until April of last year, it was The Alarm’s 40th anniversary, but it had gotten delayed because of the pandemic, so we did the tour in April and May, and it was amazing, it was fantastic, a full-on British tour, big shows every night, we were playing 32 songs in an hour and forty-five minutes, pretty intense. But during the day, I wasn’t well—I was coughing, I found it hard to sleep, I was having night sweats. But as soon as I stepped over the line and went onstage, I was fine—I could sing full-tilt. But obviously, everything was going out of control, and day by day, it was probably getting a little bit worse, but it wasn’t visible in the stats. It was nothing like that—it was just that everything was going out of whack, slightly, until when the tour finished, and then it really got bad, and I could hardly walk. When I got home, a few weeks after the tour, I couldn’t walk up the hill outside my house. I couldn’t walk up the field to see my son play football. And then I knew something really bad was up, so I went to the hospital, and when I was diagnosed with pneumonia, which is the worst thing that can happen to you when you’re a (CCL) survivor, so I knew then that that wasn’t going to be the end of it. So it was probably just the beginning of it.

Paste: So where was the hospital? There in Wales?

Peters: In Wales, yeah. But I went with my hematologist—he moved hospitals down the coast about 45 miles away, so I went in there because I’ve been with him a long time, and when it was kicking off, he advised me to go see a new doctor back in the hospital where I started from, and he said by going there I was allowed access to treatments he wasn’t allowed to prescribe under the regime he was working with at the new hospital. So I got lucky then, really. Because it was pretty groundbreaking treatment, and for a while I improved under it, but then it stopped working. And it never worked 100% for me—I think my blood count was always slightly out of whack, there was always something going on. But now my new doctor has prescribed a new treatment called Vanesoplax, and that treatment was something I had to get used to. I had to start with a ten milligram dosage and work my way up to a 400-milligram one a day. So that’s part of the reason I was in the hospital for such a long time—my body was being taught how to tolerate this drug. But since I’ve started taking it, there were a few collisions between the old regime and the new one, but eventually I was able to tolerate the full dose, and my doctor said I’d made a perfect transition from the old drug to the new one, and my blood count is absolutely normal. I mean, I’m going into hospital tomorrow for more treatment, and I have to be in hospital every two weeks for IV sessions and other treatments that back up the Vanesoplax, and go in intravenously and work on me. But yeah—I’m lucky to be alive! But my doctors have always said, “”Well, let’s not make the cure worse than the disease,” so they’ve always held off on going through bone marrow transplants with me, because that was far too heavy. So they’ve always sought other treatments and therapies. And it’s like a game of Donkey Kong—just when I get to the end of one level, he climbs up to another one.

Paste: All of which led to the new Forwards, one of your most inspired records, ever. When did these songs start occurring?

Peters: Well, most of them started in hospital, when I was there, usually for a long time, the long haul. I asked Jules if she’d bring my guitar in, to have by my bed, and most people there probably thought, “What’s he doing?” But for me, it allowed me to pass the time and change my focus. Instead of me looking internally, and looking at the world all around the hospital and the other patients and thinking, “Well, what’s going to happen to me?” I just started strumming the guitar and quietly thinking of melodies in my head. And I wasn’t intending to write an album—I just thought I’d have it just to play for pleasure, because I still find pleasure playing the guitar. And for recording, I had my iPhone, so I’d hit the voice recorder and put my ideas down, and then I started writing the words. I found it hard to sleep there, especially when I was on the ward with so many other patients and there are so many noises and bleeps. For me, it was suddenly a click track. And there were some points where you knew, when they pulled the curtains around certain people, that it was an end-of-life situation, and it was pretty frightening. So, in a way, the guitar became an instrument that I could get a lot of comfort from. And it was funny—i’d just be strumming away, and the nurses kind of liked it, and they’d go, “Keep going, mate! It sounds good, that!” There was a BBC show called The Old Grey Whistle Test, and they used to say there that if the people sweeping up the floors there started whistling your song, it was a good one. So there was something like that going on there—the nursing staff would come to clean in the morning, or it was the orderlies who would do the cleaning up, and I could see them lingering a little bit longer by my bed while I was working out a chord sequence In front of them. So I always had a little audience that started to become quite receptive to me, and it was quite nice for me—and for them, too—to have a bit of music and a bit of life going on around the whole situation.

Paste: Now are they all getting backstage passes to your upcoming Cardiff show?

Peters: Funnily enough, Yes! And we had The Gathering in January in North Wales, and loads of the NHS came to that show, and it was great. I was playing in the round on a Friday night, and I could see lots of them in their seats, singing along. And I was thinking, “Wow! They know more about the new music than the band!”

Paste: But you’ve always kept up with technology, too. I remember you playing solo at the Fillmore once, using a minidisc system in lieu of a backing band onstage, like Peaches used to do.

Peters: Yeah. That’s right. And I like all that stuff. And oddly enough, it started for me back when we nearly did our second album back in 1985 with Jimmy Iovine. We went to New York to play a concert, and we did a week of pre-production with Jimmy in a studio in New York, and he didn’t come all the time, but when he’d come in, he’d have insights into your music for you. And he said to me at the time, “Have you ever thought about writing with a drum machine? It would just give you something to play to while you’re strumming your guitar, and it could push you into different directions.” And I thought, “Okay,” so we got a drum machine and we started working with it, and I found it quite good, because you always had something to anchor you while you were playing. And from there, we got into playing with sequencers, like when The Who came along with “Baba O’Reilly,” so we started experimenting with new technology in The Alarm, and it’s never gone away completely. So in a way, The Alarm has always been an acoustic band, but we’ve always had technology at the center of it. When we had acoustic guitars, our technology was to put a Gibson amplifier pickup into an acoustic guitar, so you could hear it as loud as a Gibson. So technology has always been there, and I use it a lot, especially when I do my one-man shows—I play kick drum with my feet, and I loop it and play it back so I can move to another microphone. So yeah—you should use technology to your advantage.

Paste: So how did you keep the rhythm in the hospital, then? With spoons clickety-clacking?

Peters: Ha! Well, with the click-click-click of, you can call ‘em killing or living machines, whichever way you look at it. Because there was a lot of that going on, like someone’s heart monitor, going beep-beep-beep. And it’s going all night, so I’d wake up with those notes in my head, but I don’t know if that recorded through the album too much or not, or if I only sang songs in that key.

Paste: Were there some songs that were just too dark for the album?

Peters: Yeah, probably a few. There was one song called “Passover” that didn’t make the album, and it was quite dark, like with “Heaven’s rain is falling down” or something like that in the chorus. I mean, it had optimism, but it was dark, like “These are Biblical times.” And there was another one I had called “The Last Words of Johnny Rotten” that didn’t make it, that had the chorus line of “Ever get the feeling that you’ve been cheated,” which were the last words of Johnny Rotten when he left the stage in San Francisco that fateful night. So not everything was derived from being in hospital, but the core of the record was, that’s for sure.

Paste: In “Next,” you sing “Whatever’s trying to get me/ Makes me feel alive.”

Peters: Yeah. Well that’s it—that’s what it felt like. I was in hospital, and my glands were so swollen, it was like I had tennis balls in my neck. It was so bad, I didn’t want to look in the mirror because I couldn’t even recognize myself. It was scary, and I thought, “The only way I can get through this is, I’ve got to respect what I’m up against and allow it to be—I can’t pretend it’s not happening and wish it away. I have to embrace, so I’m gonna let this come to me, and I’m gonna take it on, and I’m gonna relish the game, I’m gonna relish the battle. I’m gonna try and be the winner here, and the only way to do that is by respecting the opponent.” Which were the drugs, because they come into you and they are killing part of you that you’ve created within yourself, in the biology of your humanity. You’ve created these things that are trying to kill you this time, so my way to combat them was to recognize them, give some respect, and say, “But you’re not gonna get the best of me—I’m gonna fight back with all I’ve got.” And that’s been my mindset all along, ever since I first heard the word ‘cancer’ applied to my life back in 1995.

Paste: I talked to Ian Astbury a few months ago, and he listed all the crazy times he nearly died, like almost freezing to death in a poorly-chosen windbreaker on a Himalayan mountaintop. He’s probably had even more close-call squeakers than you.

Peters: Yeah, maybe. But I’m lucky—I haven’t been in that kind of a situation. Although the whole of The Alarm were involved in a car crash the night after we played Top of the Pops in 1983. We’d come home from America, and we went on Top of the Pops, and flew straight back to America and then came home. And we came back to start playing a tour, and our first show was at a university in Wales. But while we were there, my 12-string guitar with pickups on it got stolen after the gig, and the tour manager, Simon Watson—who is now the manager of the Human League—he was so angry that I’d lost the guitar that he drove like a crazed person across North Wales that night, and we were all trying to get him to slow down, but he was getting angrier, and we came to this corner turn in a place called Bala, and we went ‘round the corner and the car lost control and we went straight through the hedges and into the fields. We all came around, but the car was upside down and we all had to crawl out of the vehicle, all of us. And a little old lady came up to us from nearby and said, “Come in and have a cup of tea! Our house is called Car Crash Cottage, and it looks like we’ve had another one!” It was a famous house, but Simon wouldn’t have known it because it was pitch-black that night. So our career almost ended before it began—we were lucky to come out alive.

Paste: In “The Returning,” you sing about the afterlife. Have you had any glimpses of it? And in “Forwards,” you talk about being “In the church of nonbelievers,” so what part does faith play in it all?

Peters: Yeah. “Forwards” was really my place where I could ‘Save my sanity,’ if you like, while I was in hospital. In between the IV sessions, I would be disconnected, and I could wander down the corridors and walk, and kind of save my muscle strength a little bit, because you really need to keep moving, and not just be in hospital, lying there all the time. So they said, “You can go, but just don’t go too far,” so my hospital walk was just up and down the corridors, but it was at night, and you’d see people at their loneliest in that time, when there no visitors and people had masks on, and I could see some people crying sometimes, and you’d wonder, “Wow. What’s going on there?” But if you kept walking, you’d pass by the natal clinic, where people are giving birth, with absolute joy on their faces. And then I’d meet some people on the ward who virtually gave up. You could tell that they’d given up, and they didn’t seem to want to communicate. And to me, they were in the church of the non-believers, those people I saw in the hospital, in the streets of emptiness and the city’s all deserted. So my little ward became my world, and I would wander through it at night, and in my mind, I would keep looking for the way out. I wanted that way forward, I was looking for that sign that I was gonna come out alive. I wasn’t sure if I was, at first, but I didn’t wanna become a disbeliever, either. I wanted to hang on and will the drugs to work, will the doctors to do their best, sing for the nurses so they could give me their best, and I could give my best to what they were trying to do, as well. So I tried to always think about that. But it’s a sad state of affairs when you’re in health care in the UK—and it’s free, and it’s brilliant—but doctors and the staff are briefed to not give any false hope, not really allowed to say to you, “Hey, we think you’re gonna make it!” Because if you don’t make it, somebody out there will sue them, and say, “You said he was going to get well, and he didn’t—he died, and it’s your fault!” So they won’t give you any of that false hope at all, so that was probably my walk through the afterlife—realizing that I might be transforming into a more dangerous disease, which people who’ve been suffering Leukemia for a long time can. So the doctors were worried about that, too, and they kept giving me this test and that test. And it was all trying to rule things out, but they didn’t want to frighten me or frighten my family, or give me false hope or any misinformation that could backfire on them. So I’m grateful for what I received from the NHS.

Paste: Did you get to talk to any of those lost-cause patients and maybe help bring them back to optimism?

Peters: Well, I got moved around a bit after I arrived. But yeah, I think just by playing music, with some people, it put a little bit of energy into the room, shall we say? It wasn’t a thing where people could ignore me, being in a hospital playing a guitar, because I’ve done it a lot with my charity Love Hope Strength—we’ve hosted a few things at Christmas time called The Big Busk, and I’d go and sing in all the hospitals, across them all, and sing in the corridors and sing for the surgeons, and go ‘round the wards. And it always had a massively powerful effect—I know that, and I could tell this time when I had my guitar, that this could really lift us all, and I think it gave some of the patients a lift, as well. And I wasn’t looking for that kind of feedback myself—I was just looking to stay alive, to be honest!

Paste: “Love disappearing” has some of your most fervent vocals ever, I think.

Peters: Well, I think I probably pitched it a bit too high. But I had to really push myself. And I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to sing that one, but what happened was, as soon as I got out of hospital, I put some demos down as fast as I could, and I took the demos to our producer George, but I started having all this other kind of treatment, and it was really impacting on my voice, and I wasn’t sure if my voice was gonna come back. So I’d say to George, “Look—we might have to treat this record posthumously, even though I’m still, because maybe Mike Peters, the singer, isn’t around so much. So you might have to just work with the demos.” But he liked the demos as they were, and said, “Let’s just keep on working—you’ve got the tempos worked out right, and there’s a spirit to them that I think has to remain. That sort of moment of creation has to remain.” So we just built on top of them, and then luckily, I got my voice back, so I just got in and sang them over a couple of days. So we recorded the album, start to finish, in literally two weeks, with only a couple of days off.

Paste: And you finally wade into politics on the two closing cuts, “New Standards” and “X.” Three years since lockdown, and we’ve learned nothing.

Peters: Yeah. And the whole Ukraine thing happened, and social media is out of control—people are still learning how to use it, because there are so many new things about it that we’re still coming to terms with. I kind of feel like going underground, and coming back again at another time, when everyone’s learned how to get along again. But there’s a lot of disruption in people’s lives, with the economy and wars all over the world, so it’s hard to know what to put your faith in these days.

Paste: I would be remiss not to ask how [your wife] Jules is. That was another spanner in the works, as Kate Bush would say, that you didn’t see coming.

Peters: Oh, man. When I was in hospital, we had the Love Hope Strength festival in the Sahara Desert, and at first we had a conflict because I couldn’t go, obviously. So Jules said, “No, I’ll go! And everyone’s gonna love it.” So she went and raised over 100,000 pounds, some serious money raised. We raised money for cancer care in Africa, where Jules was trekking, and I was able to speak to them from my hospital bed, by Zoom, and it was amazing. So I was kind of there, but not there, so Jules really picked up the mantle, and she’s changed as a result—she didn’t like to speak in public before, but she can do now and she’s really inspiring, because a lot of women really connect with her. And now she mentors a lot of women who suffer from breast cancer, so she does a lot of unseen work helping other women through the disease. And we’ve taken over my old studio in a chapel, and cancer patients can now stay there as a retreat. So it’s all amazing, really, and we’ve got an Alarm Staycation there this weekend, and in the pandemic, Jules worked out that we could do gigs with thirty people—that’s what we were allowed. And they could all stay in their apartments. And so we started doing internet broadcasts, and I’d play songs on a Saturday night that the fans wanted to hear and take requests.

Paste: So what are these Alarm Apartments by the Dysertal Waterfalls in Wales? And how do they work?

Peters: They’re built into the congregation area of the chapel, and were used mainly as storage. There are two on the ground floor, two on the first floor, and then a huge penthouse—they’re pretty spectacular, and we use them as holiday lets, and at the back end of the chapel’s where my studio was, but now we have a lot of yoga retreats there, and now we’ve bought the hotel next door, so we’ll keep it family owned—it’s a Victorian hotel called The Red.

Paste: Have you ever had a glimpse of the fabled Other Side?

Peters: No, but I’ve definitely faded out one time, and that was strange. I was in a hospital, and my blood count was half a million at the time, and I was having a treatment called leukapheresis, and I had needles sticking out of both arms, trying to get the bad white blood out of my system. And everything started going gray, and I was slipping down the bed. And luckily, the nurse had put a cardboard TV box at the top of the bed, and that kept me from slipping down the bed and out of reality. So the box kind of pulled me back, and Jules put some music on for me, and ironically I heard Big Country, and Stuart Adamson singing, “Like a lover’s voice on the mountainside…Stay alive!” And I thought, “Yes! I’m gonna stay alive!” And I pulled myself back out of it.

Paste: Which is a perfect example. A great song like “In a Big Country” or The Alarm’s “Blaze of Glory” can truly save your life.

Peters: It can definitely help you stay alive, without a doubt. Having a great song in your heart is a wonderful feeling. When their kids are being born, people have music, and at their funerals or at their weddings—it’s a big part of the biggest occasions in their lives, so when you’re struggling, I think you need an appropriate piece of music. And we’ve all done it—you come out of a bad day at work, and your boss has been on your back and you feel threatened. But you put that song on that you particularly like, and there’s no feeling like it. Like when that song gets a hold of you, and you hear Bruce singing “Roll back the window and let the wind blow back your hair” in “Thunder Road.” You only do that when a really great song gets a hold of you.

Paste: Call me curious, but have you actually planned your own future funeral yet?

Peters: I haven’t made any specific plans, but I think I wouldn’t mind being buried near the waterfalls, because there’s been a lot of our lives lived in this village, and there are a lot of people who come to this waterfalls, and they bring their family ashes to scatter there. And they do it secretly, but I know that it’s been done, and I think that’s kind of cool, going back to the water. But I’m sure I’ll be under pressure to have “(Going out in a) Blaze of Glory” played at my funeral, I think.

Paste: Call me ghoulish, but I can imagine the pallbearers lowering your casket into the ground and the lid popping open with you suddenly shouting, “Waidaminnut! I’ve got One! More! Song!”

Peters: Ha! I’ll take that! And I could imagine that happening! Brilliant! Now that would be a real blaze of glory!

Listen to an exclusive performance by The Alarm from June 29, 1983—40 years ago this month!

The post Mike Peters of The Alarm on Dealing with Demise and Dealing with Forwards appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The Castro Theater opened on Castro Street in 1922, and Pflueger later designed famous movie theaters like Oakland’s Paramount Theater and famous San Francisco cocktail lounges like the Top of the Mark.

“The Castro is sort of a grab bag of Beaux-Arts, Spanish Baroque, Renaissance and a variety of other styles,” said architectural historian Gerard Koskovich, “including some Art Deco elements.”

This mix of styles creates a whimsical setting designed to transport audiences into a world of fantasy and cinema.

The interior of the Castro Theater in 1927. (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)

In the beginning, the Castro showed silent films, often accompanied by live music from a variety of instruments, most famously Castro’s Wurlitzer organ. The Castro catered primarily to the working-class community in the Eureka Valley, then considered a remote suburb outside of bustling San Francisco.

“Back then, people expected to see a mixed program … some short films, maybe a newsreel, and then a feature film,” Koskovich said.

When the film’s sound arrived, the Castro received speakers installed in a large burlap-lined hole in the wall behind the square cinema screen. When film went wide screen, so did the Castro: another screen was built just a few yards in front of the original screen and proscenium, and over time the old, golden square faded into oblivion. It remains visible in the Castro backstage if you can climb the stairs.

With its 1,400 seats, the Castro was considered small for the time. In San Francisco alone, there was competition from giants like the El Capitan on Mission Street; Now a parking lot, the Cap had twice as many seats as the Castro. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “The World’s Finest Theater,” Fox Theater on Market Street (on the site where Fox Plaza is now located) had 4,651 seats.

The average cinema in 2023 has around 150 seats.

The larger theaters like Fox and El Capitan showed the big blockbusters or premieres, while Castro’s repertoire consisted mostly of second or third screenings—films that had already been played in the larger theaters.

The interior of the Castro Theater in San Francisco on August 10, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

The gay Castro

De-industrialization and white flight changed the composition of the Castro in the 1950s and 1960s. Then the gay community moved in. By all accounts, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon — a lesbian couple who became longtime community activists — were the first openly LGBTQ people to move into the Castro in 1953.

“In the 1950s, this declining working-class neighborhood began to evolve into a gay enclave,” Koskovich said. The Castro’s first gay bar — dubbed the Missouri Mule — opened in 1963. “And in the early ’70s,” Koskovich said, “the Castro was very clearly labeled as a gay neighborhood.”

Mel Novikoff was then a programmer for the Castro Theater and quickly discovered a strategy to bring the neighborhood’s fast-growing gay community to the theatre:

“Bringing back old film, mixing it with art house films and foreign films,” Koskovich said. This is key to understanding this emerging urban public, he added: “These were people who had fled their gritty, monochromatic hometowns and moved to San Francisco because they wanted to pursue a sophisticated, exciting, cosmopolitan cultural life.” Novikoff has understood that.

“And what came out at the Castro Theater,” Koskovich said, “was the fact that there were a lot of crazy movie queens in San Francisco. You just had to watch a double bill of The Women and What Happened to Baby Jane? often dressed like their favorite characters or dressed to mock some of the characters, often reciting the best lines of dialogue.

In the outside world, it wasn’t necessarily safe to be openly gay. But in the Castro Theater, gay people — mostly gay white men — felt safe to express themselves.

In 1977, the Castro Theater was recognized as a beacon for the LGBTQ community when it became San Francisco’s 100th historic landmark, protecting the exterior from demolition or alteration.

What are you wondering about the Bay Area, its culture, or people that KQED is designed to study? Ask Bay Curious.

A sanctuary

“Before there were effective treatments around 1996, staying in the community as an AIDS sufferer was impossible,” Koskovich said. In San Francisco alone, nearly 20,000 people died during the AIDS crisis — “the overwhelming majority of them gay men under 50,” Koskovich added, with the majority of them living within two miles of the Castro District. “So imagine the impact of this epidemic, not just on the city but also on this particular neighborhood.”

The Castro Theater became the chapel of a community mourning the loss of a generation of young men.

“It was a place to go after you finished the two memorial services that week for people you knew,” Koskovich recalled. “You could spend a few hours escaping to a movie or a live show. They could bring sick people and they could sit quietly in a safe, secure and comfortable place knowing that if they have any signs they will not be excluded [of AIDS], such as Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. That people would not withdraw from them. They could remain part of the community that had been built there.”

During the ’90s and 2000s, Castro Theater’s involvement and visibility in the LGBTQ community continued to grow under the watchful eye of programmer Anita Monga. She ushered in the era where film festivals like Frameline were held in theaters, as well as major film premieres.

In 2008, the Harvey Milk biopic Milk, much of which is set at the Castro, had its world premiere at the theater. In preparation for the event, the film studio funded a facelift for the Castro’s exterior, giving it a 1970s shine.

Atmosphere at the world premiere of “Milk” at the Castro Theater on October 28, 2008 in San Francisco. (Steve Jennings/WireImage)

The future of an icon

During the COVID-19 pandemic, theaters and concert halls have been closed. Although still owned by descendants of the original Nasser brothers, the Castro Theater came out in 2020 under new management, a company called Another Planet Entertainment. APE is a locally owned concert production company founded in 2003, which also manages the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Fox Theater in Oakland and the Outside Lands Festival.

APE announced plans to refurbish the Castro Theater, including removing the cinema-style fixed seating and adding tiered areas for standing room concerts. The reaction of the film community was quick and determined.

The Castro Theater Conservancy, a community organization whose mission, according to its website, is to protect the theater “as a cultural and entertainment venue for films and live performance,” announced the creation of the Save the Castro Theater campaign in response.

Michael Petrelis holds a sign that reads “Save the Seats” during a town meeting about Another Planet Entertainment renovations at the Castro Theater on August 11, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

What followed were rallies, the online #SaveTheSeats campaign and hundreds of chain emails sent to officials asking that the seats and their layout at a tourist attraction be given special protection.

The Historic Preservation Commission accepted public comments for and against the proposed land marker on February 1, 2023 at San Francisco City Hall. More than 100 people lined up and waited for hours to speak. A majority of public comments opposed proposed changes to the Castro Theater seating.

The HPC voted to recommend the Castro Theater as a landmark, but came close to specifically naming the seats in its recommendation to the San Francisco board of directors. The Castro Theater will have seating, but how many and what type is still up in the air.

Some members of the film community see the changes proposed by APE as destroying a cultural space. On the other hand, there are people who imagine a future in which queer concerts play just as much a role as queer cinema. Either way, the iconic Castro Theater will remain a part of the San Francisco experience for generations to come, whether as a beloved community space or an aging relic of a bygone era.

A final decision on his fate could be made at a board meeting on Wednesday, March 15, 2023 at San Francisco City Hall.

The post San Francisco’s Castro Theatre: A Cultural ‘Temple’ Dealing with a Combat for Its Future appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco residents, property owners and businesses that were badly impacted from January’s series of winter storms may be eligible for financial relief, Mayor London Breed announced on Tuesday.

Since the beginning of the year, San Francisco has been hit by a series of storms that prompted flooding, mudslides and power outages.

“The severe weather we just experienced has impacted many of our small businesses and residents in heavily affected areas and these initial efforts will help as part of our City’s recovery,” said Breed. “While these flood relief programs will provide support in the storms’ aftermath, we are hard at work making improvements to our infrastructure as part of a $632 million investment to help reduce the risk of flooding in the future.”

Small Business Grants

Via the city’s Flood Disaster Relief Grant program, small businesses in the city’s “flood zone” — the regions most likely to experience severe flooding in a 100-year storm — are eligible for up to $5,000 in awards, and small businesses outside of the zone can receive up to $2,000.

The San Francisco Office of Small Business will lead the effort, prioritizing businesses in the flood zone that face the most severe damage.

Grants are available for registered San Francisco businesses with a physical location that have experienced physical damage from winter storms, retroactive up to Dec. 27, 2022. Damages due to wind or power outages are not eligible.

Permitted and licensed home-based businesses, like daycares, are also eligible.

Businesses must have 100 or fewer employees and less than $5 million in gross revenue.

“We know that the recent storms have added additional difficulties to small businesses that have already been trying to recover from pandemic impacts,” said Katy Tang, executive director of the Office of Small Business. “While we recognize that this grant program will not solve all challenges, the City is offering support along with other resources and services currently available to businesses.”

A detailed map of areas determined the most at risk of flooding can be found at https://sfplanninggis.org/floodmap/.

Applications are open on Friday and close on Feb. 10. More information on the application process can be found at https://sf.gov/get-help-if-your-business-was-damaged-flooding.

The San Francisco Arts Commission and Grants for the Arts also plans to create a collaborative storm relief fund for San Francisco artists and art organizations. More details will be shared on the agency’s website once details are finalized.

Property Damage Relief

For those facing property damage, the city recommends residents and businesses to contact their insurance company to assess damages and purchase flood insurance.

Businesses and homeowners can also apply for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s Floodwater Management Grant Assistance Program, which can provide over $100,000 in flood mitigation improvements on properties.

Tax Relief Opportunities

San Francisco property owners may also be eligible for property tax relief if they suffered over $10,000 in flood damage. A disaster relief form must be submitted to the Assessor-Recorder by one year of the date of loss.

“We know that these recent storms are unlike anything our city has seen in decades and have caused significant hardship for many property owners. Given the impacts of this severe weather, the Office of the Assessor-Recorder wants all San Franciscans to be aware they may qualify for property tax relief and that our staff is available to help walk them through the process from start to end,” said Assessor-Recorder Joaquín Torres.

The post Reduction Grants for Residents, Companies Going through Flood Harm in San Francisco – NBC Bay Space appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Chesa Boudin and Lorenzo Charles became friends during monthly visits to their mothers in a maximum-security prison.

Lorenzo’s mother was behind bars for a relatively minor drug offense; Kathy Boudin, a leader of the radical Weather Underground, was doing twenty 20 years to life for her role as an unarmed getaway driver in a 1981 Brinks robbery near New York City that ended with three dead.

When 6-year-old Chesa screamed at his mother for abandoning him as an infant, Lorenzo calmed him. When Chesa refused to do homework, his mother urged him to emulate Lorenzo, an A-student who lived with his grandmother in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood.

Not yet 5 years old, Chesa had been visiting his father in prison for almost four years. A few years later, he began to spend weekends with him in trailer visits.

(Family handout)

Chesa lived in Chicago with his adopted family of activist intellectuals. With their support, he channeled his anger into achievement. He lost touch with Lorenzo. In his first semester at Yale, Chesa received a letter from his father, imprisoned for his role in the Brinks robbery. He had met Lorenzo on his cell block. Doing time for burglary.

It’s a story so central to Boudin’s life that he tells it over and over, always with the same last line: For Lorenzo, “the odds played out.”

Lorenzo’s fate drew Boudin to research and write about those odds against children of incarcerated parents, which deepened his convictions about injustice and racism, which propelled him to law school and a job as public defender in San Francisco.

And then he made a move in some ways as radical as his parents’ choices: In 2019, he ran for San Francisco district attorney, promising to use incarceration as a last resort, tackle systemic racial inequities and prosecute police brutality.

Everything about his victory was improbable. He was a 39-year-old public defender who had never prosecuted a case. In a city where politics is a blood sport, he was a candidate who had never run for anything since class vice president in sixth grade. His four parents, the two who bore him and the two who raised him, had been faces on FBI Most Wanted posters.

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin, center, with his chief of staff, David Campos, and Assistant Dist. Atty. Rachel Marshall at a news conference in 2020 announcing manslaughter charges against a former San Francisco police officer, Chris Samayoa, who fatally shot an unarmed carjacking suspect in 2017.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

Opponents registered the domain name recallchesaboudin.org. within days of his being sworn in. Fueled by tech money, fears of crime, and San Francisco politics, the June 7 recall election has made Boudin a lightning rod for every tragedy in the city, the target of anger over homeless encampments, drug dealing, gun violence and home burglaries.

San Francisco voters’ verdict on Boudin will reverberate far beyond the city’s 47 square miles, including in Los Angeles, where Dist. Atty. George Gascón faces a potential recall. Because if you can’t make radical change in San Francisco, what future does the progressive prosecutor movement have?

Two months after he took office, Boudin spoke at a Columbia University conference that focuses on ending mass incarceration. In the front row was his mother Kathy, paroled in 2003, doctorate in education in 2007, founder of the center that organizes the annual event.

“I never wanted to run for office,” Boudin said. “Because of the compromise. Because of the mucky, disgusting policymaking process. The moral clarity of being a public defender was safer, was easier…. But I found myself, I think we all find ourselves, in a pretty unique historic moment…. And now I face the slippery slope of compromise. Every day.”

When he stood up in court, which he did often, he was clear what “for the people” meant: “A lot of people in my role don’t think that ‘the people’ include those they are prosecuting.”

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin during his swearing-in ceremony in San Francisco on Jan. 8, 2020.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

He was trying to disrupt the paradigm that divides the world into good victims and bad criminals, that equates locking people up with public safety, that measures success by convictions. He was trying to redefine success as interventions that healed victims and held criminals accountable, yet offered a path to redemption.

He hired former public defenders in top jobs to “bring people into the office who don’t just theoretically know that the person they’re prosecuting is a three-dimensional person … who have seen racial profiling and what it looks like in police reports. Seen people who are wrongfully accused.”

He was trying to convince career prosecutors that they had been wielding their enormous power wrongly.

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“They don’t want to believe that for their entire life, their entire career, they’ve been doing harm,” he said months later at a symposium. “They don’t want to believe that an outsider like me, a career public defender, knows better than they do how to be a prosecutor, or how to be a prosecutor that helps promote public safety.”

This, more than any specific reform, has made him a polarizing figure, loved and reviled, savior and threat.

“I just want to live in a city where the DA prosecutes crime,” tweeted Michelle Tandler, an entrepreneur and recall supporter. “My home has been overrun by radicals and the criminals they empower.”

The COVID-19 pandemic bred insecurity and fear, addicts and homeless stood out on empty San Francisco streets, home burglaries surged as tourists vanished and tech workers left the city, and Boudin’s past, which shapes all that he does, was reduced to a simple refrain: son of terrorists.

On Oct. 20, 1981, Kathy Boudin dropped her 14-month-old son at the babysitter and joined his father, David Gilbert, assigned to pick up members of the Black Liberation Army after they robbed a Brinks truck in a suburban mall.

Chesa Boudin credits time spent in the Childrens Center at the Bedford Hills state prison, an unusual family-oriented visiting space for mothers and children, with enabling him to establish a strong relationship with his mother Kathy.

(Family Handout)

The plan went awry; Black revolutionaries shot and killed a Brinks guard and two police officers. Boudin and Gilbert were arrested at the scene.

Chesa was adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, friends of his parents from the movement. By 7, he was flying solo more than a dozen times a year from their Chicago home to New York for prison visits.

Chesa Boudin with his two fathers, David Gilbert, left, and Bill Ayers, who along with his wife adopted the toddler after his parents’ arrest.

(Family handout)

“We’d be going about our lives, and then Chesa would be gone for four days,” said Sam Kass, a close friend since childhood. “He would go off into this other world and then come back to ours. And we’d be running around and riding bikes.”

By junior high, years of therapy helped channel his rage and guilt into ambition and achievement. “It was a very conscious decision,” Kass said. “He just worked harder at everything than everybody in everything he did. Whether he was good at it or not.”

He was the A-student who read the most books, the multitasker who editorialized against the abolition of a free period, which he used to email family, eat, talk to teachers, get library books, make photocopies, attend club meetings and catch up on “those little things adults call errands.”

Chesa on his sixth birthday. He was slow to learn to read and suffered epileptic fits as a child.

(Family handout)

His nickname was the Shark: Always moving, or you die.

In a home that was a salon for children as well as adults, Chesa developed both a hard shell and an outspoken sense of injustice.

When teachers told him to wear a name tag the first day at school, Chesa threw such a fit that Ayers had to intercede. The problem was not the name tag, but the itchy yarn around his neck, Boudin recalled in an interview. Thirty-three years later, righteous indignation still tinged his voice:

“I wasn’t being rebellious for the sake of being rebellious. I was uncomfortable.”

Column One

A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times.

He embraced, first by necessity and then by choice, a life that straddled two worlds.

“Every day I combine two lives: one immersed in the stability of privilege and the other meeting the challenges of degradation,” Boudin wrote in his college application essay.

Reconnecting with Lorenzo Charles became the impetus for research on the rights of children of incarcerated parents and the biases of a system that disproportionately locks up Black men.

Boudin spoke around the country with a friend whose father had been a leader of the Attica prison rebellion.

“I would be the one who would be emotional,” Emani Davis said. “And he would stick to all the points.”

Boudin’s first new program as district attorney allowed parents charged with certain low-level crimes to enroll in classes and therapy in lieu of jail.

In response to criticism that the policy arbitrarily favored parents, Boudin pointed to the capriciousness of a system that sent his mother to prison for 22 years and sentenced his father to life, for the same crime:

“You point me to a place in the criminal justice system where the quality of justice is not arbitrary,” he said.

Weather Underground member Katherine Boudin is led out of the Rockland County Courthouse in New City, N.Y., by sheriff’s officers on Nov. 21, 1981.

(David Handschuh / Associated Press)

On, Oct. 24, 1981, David Gilbert is escorted by police into the Village Hall in Nyack, N.Y., for a hearing on felony murder charges stemming from the Oct. 20, 1981, Brinks armored car robbery at a mall in Nanuet, N.Y., and a subsequent shootout with Nyack police that left three people dead.

(David Handschuh / Associated Press)

Kathy Boudin still has the well-worn paper atlas she kept in her prison cell, immersed in maps that became a lifeline to her teenage son when he discovered travel.

“It was a leap that I remember experiencing as him owning a certain part of life that he created, that he loved, and then he would share with all of us. But it was his,” she recalled.

He counted countries as intensely as he studied. (Now more than 100, on all seven continents.)

The night that Kathy Boudin was released from parole, after seven years during which she could not leave New York without permission, she called her son.

“He said, ‘Great! Now we can travel together,’” she recalled.

When Chesa Boudin decided to run for district attorney, the hardest part was telling his parents.

“I was wary, even unhappy about it,” Gilbert wrote in an interview from prison (he was since granted clemency and paroled in November). “I’m skeptical about what one can accomplish in the money-laden arena of electoral politics.”

“I was very concerned that as a prosecutor, you have to prosecute people. You have to put people in prison,” Kathy Boudin said. “What would that be like for him and how would he handle that?”

He handled it by leaning into his family history to make points: People are more than their worst mistake. A man in his 70s with a perfect record during four decades in prison posed no danger to society and belonged at home. Coming face to face with victims can be the most potent rehabilitation.

“The thing that made the biggest difference for my mom was when she met one of the people whose lives she had turned upside down by participating in the crime,” Boudin told a forum.

Neither Kathy Boudin nor Bernardine Dohrn ever expected their son to enter politics. He had been a Rhodes scholar, worked as a translator for the administration of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, written a coming-of-age memoir (ever competitive, he boasts it received the worst review ever in the New York Times), returned to Yale for law school.

Then he found a home at the San Francisco public defender’s office, which he talks about with uncharacteristic passion. “The energy, esprit de corps, commitment — the culture of the institution is one I found to be addictive,” he said.

But the victories of prosecutors like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Rachael Rollins in Boston convinced him that a shift in public opinion had created opportunity for systemic change. In 2018, he was a finalist to run Los Angeles’ vast public defender’s office. That emboldened him when Gascón, the San Francisco district attorney at the time, decided not to run again, creating the first open contest for the office in 110 years.

A political novice, Boudin had two key assets. He was confident he would outwork the competition. And he was a networker since childhood. “There were 400 kids in our high school class,” said his brother Malik Dohrn, seven months older. “I stay in touch with eight. Chesa stays in touch with 400.”

Boudin eked out a narrow victory, defeating Mayor London Breed’s favored candidate.

As he celebrated the night of his inauguration, Boudin had no idea how prophetic his words would soon seem:

“2020 is going to be an amazing year. There’s going to be a roller-coaster ride.”

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin gestures as he walks with his wife, Valerie Block, during his swearing-in ceremony in San Francisco on Jan. 8, 2020.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

For a while, the roller coaster brought heady highs: The twin crises of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd made Boudin’s agenda both more urgent and politically feasible.

Keeping people out of jail — to provide space for social distance and reduce spread of the coronavirus — became an imperative amid a health emergency. The jail population shrank so quickly the city was able to close a structurally unsafe lockup.

The strength of the Black Lives Matter protests temporarily quieted Boudin’s most outspoken adversary, the police union, and fueled his agenda.

Prosecutors no longer asked for cash bail. They stopped seeking gang enhancements or “three strikes” charges, which dramatically increase the length of sentences. They refused to file charges for contraband seized during pretext stops, which overwhelmingly target Blacks and Latinos

Boudin filed the first homicide charges in the history of San Francisco against a police officer for actions while on duty, then filed charges against four more.

The plunge came with equally dizzying speed. On New Year’s Eve 2020, a man on parole sped through an intersection and hit and killed two women, police said. Multiple agencies could have made different decisions that would have averted the tragedy, but the spotlight was on the district attorney’s failure to press charges that might have kept Troy McAlister behind bars.

McAlister’s name became shorthand for a prosecutor who let dangerous criminals roam the streets. The recall movement gathered momentum.

“As car break-ins and burglaries reached a crisis level in San Francisco, Boudin’s refusal to hold serial offenders accountable is putting more of us at risk,” the recall committee said.

Boudin tried for months to counter the accusations and underlying fears with data: Homicides had increased from a record low in 2019, but at a slower rate than neighboring jurisdictions. Police data showed crime overall had dropped in 2020. He was prosecuting drug cases at higher rates than his predecessor, while police were solving crimes at historically low rates.

He now sees the efforts to focus on the data as a mistake.

“In a world where people have good reason to be really skeptical of what they’re told by the government, if you’re scared, the last thing you want to hear is somebody tell you that your fear is irrational,” he said in March.

Boudin had won election by being the outsider who criticized a failed system; now he owned the system. To redefine public safety, to demonstrate that communities can be safe locking up fewer people, to build a consensus for programs that might break cycles of recidivism, would take years.

“So what do you do? You still have an ethical obligation to implement the best policies with the most consistency and the longest-term impact that you can politically afford to do. That’s the balancing act,” he said.

Boudin gravitates toward sports he characterizes as “mind over matter,” in which “there is literally always a little bit better you can do. And it’s always within your control. Or it feels that way.” He ran his first marathon after college on a course he measured around his parents’ camp in Northern California.

“It was him against him,” Dohrn said. “It was perfect in a way.”

The recall too is Boudin against himself.

He is still the outsider, a political interloper in a tightknit city. In a job that’s often a political springboard — one of his predecessors is now vice president of the United States — he is an anomaly; his ambition, said Judith Resnik, his law school mentor, “is to change what the whole world understands the role of a prosecutor to be.”

He likens his current situation to another favorite sport, chess, which he learned as a child from his grandfather, the prominent civil rights attorney Leonard Boudin.

“To the best of your ability, you’re anticipating what’s coming down the road and how you respond to it so that you’ve thought it through, and you’re not just reacting in the moment,” he said.

“But you can’t always see what’s coming.”

The post How San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin ended up dealing with a recall appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

traTwo San Francisco school board members facing a recall squared off Wednesday night, with Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga publicly clashing over their plan to spend money on a new parent advisory committee as the district tries to pare back expenses.

It was a heated disagreement less than two weeks before an election day that could see both removed from office.

The conflict unfolded during a budget committee meeting looking at the impact of a resolution by Collins to create a Queer Transgender Parent Advisory Council and add a central office staff position to support the group.

Moliga, who chaired the meeting, questioned the financial impact of the measure, which would cost an estimated $260,000 in startup costs as well as $220,000 annually for a district staff person.

The district faces a $125 million shortfall next year, which has resulted in the appointment of a state expert to help guide financial decisions, including a recent recommendation to freeze all but critical spending and hiring. The conflict reflects what’s at stake personally for these board members and how passionate commissioners have become on the issues facing the district such as the budget crisis, equity and the role of families in public education.

With two of the three committee members present, Moliga declined to support moving the measure forward until further review, which meant it was not guaranteed to up for vote at the next school board meeting Tuesday — the last one before the Feb. 15 recall vote.

He wanted the board to consider several upcoming resolutions, including this one, in a committee of the whole meeting to prioritize spending and identify funding sources.

“We’re in a budget deficit,” he said Thursday. “I was trying to be really responsible in moving forward and making decisions. Our sole responsibility (on the budget committee) is to vet items, to figure out the fiscal impact.”

Collins took to Twitter during the meeting, writing “Commissioner Molinga said he could not support moving the resolution forward without ‘further fiscal analysis’. Make no mistake, this is a tactic.” She also retweeted a message that called him “spineless.”

Collins did not respond to a request for comment on the interaction.

Moliga said he did not see the tweets and preferred not to read them, adding he fully supports the queer and trans community and would not be pulled into a fight. His only goal, he said, was to “show leadership for the people.”

“We have to figure out how we pay for all these things so that it makes sense,” he said. “If (Collins) wants to have a conversation, she can give me a call.”

Collins had not identified funding sources for the measure.

Board President Gabriela López, who also faces a recall and has been aligned with Collins on many issues, tweeted Thursday that she would place the measure on Tuesday’s agenda despite a lack of support from the budget committee.

Collins also publicly criticized Moliga last year. She accused him of not respecting women when he was nominated for the vice presidency in 2021 after the board removed Collins from the position in the wake of the rediscovery of her offensive tweets comparing Asian Americans to “house n****r[s].”

Collins was also stripped of committee assignments, including her seat on the budget committee.

Collins’ resolution, which seeks “Equitable Representation and Services for Two-Spirit Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Intersex Asexual (2SLGBTQIA+) Parents and Families,” is among several measures adopted or considered by the board in the past two years to support specific demographic groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and English learners.

The school board currently hears from 14 advisory councils and committees, and four of them have central office staff liaison.

Collins’ queer and transgender resolution would require leadership of the associated parent advisory council to be parents or caregivers who identify as 2SLGBTQIA+, even if their children who are students in the district don’t.

Heterosexual parents or caregivers and those who are not transgender would not be able to hold leadership positions despite the gender or sexuality of their children.

District staff recommended adopting the queer transgender resolution only if the board identified funding or budget cuts to pay for it given the district’s financial crisis. The board recently adopted a budget balancing plan to cover the deficit, which included $50 million in cuts to schools.

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Jilltucker

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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF / BCN) – To give residents facing eviction another chance, San Francisco supervisor Dean Preston expects to enact law during Tuesday’s board meeting that requires landlords to give tenants a 10 day notice before filing an eviction notice.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, landlords wishing to move out a tenant could typically file a three-day eviction lawsuit before the eviction process began.

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However, since the pandemic, California law introduced a new 15-day obligation for landlords to notify renters of eviction for non-payment of rent. The new state law aims to give tenants more time to access funds through rent relief programs.

Preston said his bill would ensure that similar protections remain in place for tenants exposed to an eviction after the pandemic-induced protections expire.

“This bill would create a warning period,” Preston said in a phone interview on Monday. “What we are doing with this legislation is that the protection is permanent, not just during the pandemic. We should give people options instead of driving them away. “

According to Preston, a former tenant lawyer, evictions can make it difficult for renters to find housing in the future and can even affect people’s physical and mental health, putting them at higher risk of displacement or homelessness.

“The broader context here is that California is pretty tough on this rent non-payment issue,” Preston said. “On the fourth day – that’s it. Even if the tenant can raise the money, he can still be evicted from his apartment. “

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The Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco Executive Director Fred Sherburn-Zimmer said, “Renters have more time to fix problems, which means tenants can stay in their homes.”

“People should have time to resolve disputes before landlords request an eviction,” said Ora Prochovnick, Eviction Defense’s collaborative eviction director of litigation and policy. “This law is a game changer. It will help save thousands of San Franciscans who would otherwise lose their homes. “

If the law were ultimately approved by the city’s board of directors and then enacted by Mayor London Breed, the law would make San Francisco the first city in the state to introduce such an eviction notice.

Back in October, shortly after California’s eviction moratorium imposed during the pandemic expired and hundreds of thousands of renters across the state who were unable to pay their rent were vulnerable to the loss of their homes. In response, Preston declared his district a “no evacuation zone” and encouraged tenants to apply for government rent reduction funds, to seek legal representation and to find out about local evictions, among other things.

Preston’s borough includes neighborhoods such as Hayes Valley, Fillmore, Japantown, Lower Pacific Heights, Western Addition, Cole Valley, and Inner Sunset.

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