I’ve been trying to leave San Francisco since 2014. After fake retiring in 2012, I thought it was only logical to move to a lower-cost area of the country, like Honolulu, to save money and be closer to my folks.

Yes, Honolulu isn’t cheap, but it’s cheaper than San Francisco! However, every time I try to leave, San Francisco pulls me back in.

Here are some reasons why:

• 2014: Found an ocean-view home in San Francisco for cheap, so I bought it instead of buying a much more expensive ocean-view home in Honolulu.
• 2017: Had our first child, so we decided to stay for continuity. As first-time parents, we had enough stress.
• 2019: Had our second child. There’s a lot of comfort in knowing your doctors when you have a newborn.
• 2020: The pandemic forced us to shelter in place for several months. Relocating to a new city with an infant and three-and-a-half year-old during a pandemic creates more uncertainty.
• 2021: Son got into a Mandarin immersion school. He’s enjoyed his experience so far, so it’s hard to pull him out and place him in a new school.
• 4Q 2023: An opportunity to purchase a dream home at a more affordable price, so we did.
• Fall 2024: The possibility of going back to work full-time once both kids are in school full-time. The job opportunities are more plentiful in San Francisco than in Honolulu.

Having A Family Makes Leaving Any City More Difficult

If we didn’t have kids, I’m sure my wife and I would have relocated to Honolulu years ago. We longed to live a simpler life near the ocean in year-round warm weather. We had enough money to live comfortably, but not extravagantly.

I imagined fixing up my grandparents’ old farmhouse in Waianae and eating off the land. After breakfast, we’d go to the beach to boogie board or surf. Then we’d come home, eat some poké, and take a nap. Then we might go for a late afternoon hike.

Although we’d lose all status and prestige, we’d be mentally and physically healthier and happier! Not a bad trade over just making money. Alas, we had kids, which are a blessing.

Once you have a family, inertia makes it very hard to relocate. Your house, school, friends, network, and healthcare providers all keep you stationary.

Why I Love San Francisco

Besides America, I’ve lived between 6 months and 4 years in six other countries. I’ve also visited over 150 cities worldwide. San Francisco is on my list of the top five best cities in the world.

Here are the reasons why:

• The weather is mild year-round, which is great for exercising outdoors.
• The city and the surrounding region are beautiful, especially if you can live in a home with views.
• Napa/Sonoma Valley are only an hour and 15 minutes away.
• Lake Tahoe has world-class skiing/snowboarding 3.5 hours away.
• Closer to Hawaii and Asia than cities on the East Coast.
• Fantastic universities such as Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF, Santa Clara, etc
• Always a top three culinary city in America
• Bountiful job and consulting opportunities that pay well
• One of the most diverse cities in the world
• One of the cheapest international cities in the world
• Tons of entertainment, like tennis tournaments, entertainers, and art shows come here

Why I Dislike San Francisco

Of course, no city is perfect. Here are some reasons why I dislike San Francisco:

• Some corrupt city officials
• Government waste
• Crime and homelessness
• High cost of living
• Intense hustle culture in some industries
• Bureaucracy when it comes to getting things done

But the reality is, every single city has these bullet points to various degrees. The one thing I love about Honolulu over San Francisco is the lack of hustle culture. Once you’ve left an intense career, you won’t want to be constantly surrounded by go-getters.

Excitement Is What Keeps Me In San Francisco

I’ve gone through the pros and cons of San Francisco many times before. But what I realized most recently is that excitement is one of the main reasons why I remain in San Francisco.

As someone who easily gets bored, I need to be in a vibrant city where there’s something exciting always going on. Let me share a couple of examples.

1) APEC Comes To San Francisco

San Francisco recently hosted APEC, the Asia Pacific Economic Council. President Biden, China’s President Xi, and a bunch of other world leaders came to hob knob.

As an Asian person who lived in The Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and Malaysia until high school, it was exciting to see 21 APEC leaders come to town and build relationships. Here are some photos of who came to San Francisco for APEC.

Not only were world political leaders in town but so were top musicians like Sting and Yoshiki serenading Marc Benioff (Founder of Salesforce) and other luminaries at his event. Elon Musk came to town as well.

The world’s media was focused on San Francisco for two weeks. The spotlight brings in more interest, more investments, more jobs, and more demand to visit and live in the city.

It’s hard to leave San Francisco when you know many people want to live here.

2) OpenAI CEO Firing Debacle

After APEC ended, OpenAI’s board voted its CEO, Sam Altman out for an unspecified reason. After Atman’s firing, there was a huge outcry of support from the VC and tech community. Greg Brockton, the President quit, along with several senior researchers. As a result, the board is under immense pressure to resign and reinstate Altman as CEO.

If you’ve watched Succession on HBO, the entire OpenAI debacle feels like the show on hyperspeed. Exciting and fascinating to observe!

Once again, the entire tech world is focused on what the heck is going on in San Francisco with the largest artificial intelligence company in the world.

For a quick overview of what’s going on at OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT:

1. Altman clashed with the board on the direction of the company (e.g. profits vs. non-profit, AI safety, speed of development of technology, Altman wanting to start another company, etc)
2. Power struggle between Altman and Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist
3. In a coup by Sutskever, on a Google Meet, “Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon.” Shortly after, Brockman was told he was being removed from his position as chairman of the board but would hold on to his role as president. 
4. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella found out about the board’s decision just like the rest of us on Twitter, despite having invested over $10 billion in OpenAI. Interestingly, despite the investment amount, Microsoft doesn’t have a board seat.
5. OpenAI employees were on the cusp of being able to sell their shares at a staggering $86 billion valuation. But now that valuation amount is looking suspect. OpenAI’s board may have torched tens of billions in shareholder value.
6. Now OpenAI’s board is under pressure to reinstate Altman, who is considering coming back if the board is removed. But he’s not! Emmett Shear from Twitch is now CEO.
7. Altman is joining Microsoft to lead a new AI project. Working for big tech seems like a disappointment for Altman, but a win for Microsoft to control more pieces and get an in-house AI technology.

If you’ve lived in San Francisco since 2001, as I have, you inevitably will know people involved in this drama. How could you leave? The awkwardness is going to be amazing during the next board meeting!

Be In The Right Place At The Right Time To Get Rich

Half the battle of getting rich and/or getting ahead is being in the right place at the right time. When you can easily meet decision-makers in person, it’s much easier to build relationships. And when you have good relationships, life gets easier.

I’m talking about getting a job or a consulting gig, getting your kids into school, raising money for your company or fund, starting a business, and more. If you’re a helpful and relatively nice person, you will get farther ahead than those who aren’t.

Hard To Get Back In Once You Leave San Francisco

If you leave San Francisco, like many did during the pandemic, there’s a fear you might never be able to get back in.

The job you vacated will have been taken by a hungry colleague. Your network will forget about you once you leave. And the prime property you owned will be scooped up by another family and not be available for the next 30 years!

I’ve lived in San Francisco since 2001 because I felt the tech/internet boom was here to stay. Yes, the dotcom bubble had burst in March 2000, but the groundwork was laid for Web 2.0.

Given I couldn’t get a job in tech, I bought public tech company stocks. Then I bought as much San Francisco real estate as I could afford. Picks and shovels for those who’ve been shut out!

It seems obvious that artificial intelligence will revolutionize the world again. However, this time, the stakes may be even higher because AI could eliminate my children’s jobs as well as yours.

Fear Keeps Me In San Francisco

With Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies, there was a greater possibility of getting rich by joining these companies or investing in them after they went public.

But with artificial intelligence, there seems like less opportunity given fewer people are needed to scale. These private AI companies are staying private for longer, shutting out public investors. In addition, artificial intelligence is a direct attack on eliminating jobs in many industries!

By staying in San Francisco, I feel like I’m acting as a loyal soldier of the Night’s Watch in the Game of Thrones. The White Walkers are coming to destroy us, it’s only a matter of time when. But when they do, I want to be here to defend my family!

AI is like the Night King

I’m always thinking 10+ years ahead because you have to if you want to effectively plan for your future. With a three and six-year-old, I’m concerned for their futures.

From Non-Profit To Mega Profits In AI

OpenAI went from being a non-profit whose mission was to help humanity to being a for-profit company worth $86 billion and largely owned by Microsoft.

Huh?

No matter what the OpenAI leaders say, the reason why the company became a for-profit company was to make tons of money for its leaders, owners, and employees.

This is Capitalism 101!

Think about it. No matter how rich you already are, you can’t help but want more money, more power, and more fame.

Listen to all the corporate speak you want from AI leaders promoting a “harmless technology” for the greater good of humanity. There will be positive benefits from AI for sure. However, there will also be negatives as well, including massive disinformation, fraud, and millions of job losses.

ChatGPT and Claude.ai already scrapes the internet for data and makes it their own without given any attribution to creators like me. Yet, AI folks say this isn’t stealing. No wonder why Medium is blocking all AI crawlers from its content.

Investing In AI For My Family

So what is a dad of two kids and a non-working spouse going to do? Accept reality and adapt!

There’s no way I can beat AI. As a result, I need to either work in AI or invest in AI companies determined to wipe my kind off the map.

Getting a lucrative AI job is going to be difficult. Everyone wants one. But investing in private AI companies is accessible to me, and now it is accessible to all of you through funds like the Fundrise Innovation Fund. `

I’ve already committed $1,000,000 in various private venture capital and venture debt funds which invest parts of their portfolios in AI companies.

I plan to invest another $500,000 in venture capital funds that invest in AI companies over the next three to five years.

If AI revolutionizes the world, then my investments will likely pay off. If AI turns out to be overhyped, then my children will likely still land good jobs.

A Parent’s Fear Is The Greatest Motivator

One of a parent’s fears is spending 18 years educating their children, then spending a small fortune sending them to college, then ending up with despondent adult children who can’t get jobs in their fields of study.

This fear is one of the reasons why I’m reluctant to encourage anybody to pay full retail for college. Going to a public college or community college is the way to go! Lower price equals less possibility for disappointment.

With AI, sadly, I think more high school and college graduates will find themselves underemployed and disillusioned in the future.

By thinking 20+ years ahead for my 3 and 6-year-olds, I can better hedge against potential career disappointments. If they can’t get relevant jobs that provide purpose, I’ll pull them aside one day and share a version of this note.

A Conversation To My Adult Kids

“Dear Son/Daughter,

I wish life wasn’t so cruel. You studied your hardest in school and did your best over the past five years to find a job in your field. I’m so proud of you because you tried!

Even though things might not have turned out as you planned, your mom and I are here for you. Don’t give up! Good things are yet to come.

We have a surprise for you. In 2023, your old man recognized the future and invested accordingly. Here are the proceeds from various AI investments we made.

You’re a grown adult now. Feel free to use the funds to pursue what you really want to do. Don’t forget to come visit sometime OK?

We love you,

Mom and Dad

So there you have it folks. There’s too much excitement, fear, and AI going on to leave San Francisco. Maybe in our 50s will we finally move to Honolulu. But not now. We need to protect our children’s futures.

Reader Questions

Anybody live in San Francisco and find it difficult to leave? Are you worried about artificial intelligence taking away jobs for your children as well? Besides working in AI and investing in AI, what else can we do to protect our financial futures?

Besides politics and not being able to afford to live on San Francisco, why else do some people who don’t live in San Francisco hate San Francisco so much?

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The post Why It is So Exhausting To Go away San Francisco: Pleasure, Concern, AI appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

“Urban doom loop.” “Office real estate apocalypse.” Today, anyone who reads business news has seen dire predictions for America’s downtown commercial towers, which emptied out when the coronavirus arrived and remain under-occupied three and a half years later. Most coverage centers on the most expensive big cities, such as New York.

But the focus on glittering superstar cities is misguided, because many more fragile downtowns—the likes of Dayton, Ohio; Birmingham, Alabama; and St. Louis—entered the pandemic with little margin for failure. Even Minneapolis, with a strong overall labor market, faced a high office-vacancy rate in 2019. Still more commercial space emptied out during the pandemic, and foot traffic downtown has waned. “It’s spooky,” one retail clerk told The Wall Street Journal.

To be sure, Manhattan office investors and their lenders certainly have plenty to lose, because participating in that market was so expensive to begin with. According to the 2023 outlook from the commercial-real-estate company Colliers International, asking rents for downtown Class A office space in Manhattan are $81 a square foot per year, down slightly from $85 the year before the pandemic. Current rents for comparable space in San Francisco ($79) and Boston ($72) also dwarf the rents typical in boomtowns such as Atlanta ($38), Denver ($39), and Dallas ($31). The rents in some of the priciest markets have started to come down—notably in San Francisco, where Class A rents, according to Colliers, hit $105 in 2019—but are still nowhere close to Sun Belt levels.

Dror Poleg: The next crisis will start with empty office buildings

Class A refers to a city’s most attractive buildings—typically recently constructed towers in desirable locations. If rents for such buildings in Manhattan must drop by half to return to normal occupancy, landlords will lose a lot of money. Some major real-estate investors in New York are halting debt payments for certain properties and giving up control to their lenders. The shift in the market could cost New York City 3 to 6 percent of its tax revenue, by some estimates. But the city will still be the world’s financial capital; a tech hub; the headquarters of a slew of major corporations; a home to major educational, medical, and cultural institutions—all of which generates demand for office space even in the remote-work era. New York, in other words, will be fine.

By contrast, if office rents in the Rust Belt or the Mississippi River Valley drop by anything close to half, downtowns in those regions face abandonment—not only by white-collar businesses and the shops and restaurants that once served their employees but also by the owners of entire buildings. In a city such as Dayton—which, according to Colliers, has downtown Class A rents of $18 a square foot per month and had a vacancy rate of more than 25 percent even before the pandemic—rents can’t fall far while still yielding enough money to pay taxes and operating costs. Class A rents are comparably low in Memphis, Tennessee ($20); St. Louis ($20); Albuquerque, New Mexico ($23); Cleveland and Akron, Ohio ($23); and Birmingham ($23). St. Louis and Albuquerque also had pre-pandemic vacancy rates hovering around 20 percent or higher. Many cities, including Dayton, are working—with some success—to repurpose their downtown with new condos and apartments, restaurants, and entertainment venues. But how quickly struggling central business districts can replace what used to be their core economic activity is an open question. In the meantime, a lender who seizes a commercial building in so weak a market may turn around and surrender the property to the city rather than run up bills while awaiting a buyer.

That is what an actual public-policy crisis looks like: Think of Detroit, Buffalo, or Flint, Michigan—places where, over the past several decades, owners simply stopped paying property taxes and let the government take over. Many abandoned buildings were demolished for surface parking or left vacant altogether, in some cases prompting major publicly funded demolition campaigns that continue today.

When downtown commercial rents are high, it’s partly because the downtowns themselves are desirable places to work—and partly because the supply of office space is limited. New York, Boston, San Francisco, and other cities that are notorious for limiting housing construction also constrain the supply of commercial real estate. The high cost of building in some cities also helps explain high rents, but only up to a point. Indeed the New York Building Congress found that office-construction costs are 15 to 50 percent higher in New York than in most other major U.S. cities. This might justify rents that are persistently 15 to 50 percent higher, but the artificial scarcity is the primary explanation for why, before the pandemic, Class A rents in Manhattan were 74 percent higher than in Chicago and 82 percent higher than in Los Angeles.

For all the hand-wringing about New York, a major rent drop could end up being good for business. Brad Hargreaves, a New York–based entrepreneur, told me on Twitter (now X) earlier this year that his education start-up, General Assembly, rented a “beautiful” space for $29 per square foot in 2010. “In 2018–19 they were charging upwards of $75psf,” he wrote. “We never would’ve started GA if we had faced those rents on Day 1.” Acknowledging this threat to the city’s competitiveness, Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio broke from anti-growth norms by rezoning areas such as Hudson Yards and East Midtown to permit more office space. Bloomberg’s “upzoning” of Hudson Yards alone legalized 28 million square feet of potential office construction—more than all of the office space of Portland, Oregon.

Not least because of that easing of regulations, Manhattan still has more than 11 million square feet of downtown office supply under construction, Colliers reported earlier this year. That’s about four Empire State Buildings. It’s nearly as much downtown office space under construction as in the entire South—which includes Atlanta, Houston, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas, and a dozen other cities. Even if the pandemic had never brought about an exodus from white-collar workplaces, the addition of so much new commercial space in New York would have forced the owners of existing office buildings to hold down or even cut rents. The new space, combined with the remote- and hybrid-work shocks to office demand, may foretell a Houston-like abundance of office space—which means that Manhattan office rents might conceivably fall to a Houston-like $40 to $50 a square foot.

If you own a dilapidated, highly leveraged building in Manhattan, you may lose it to the bank. But then the bank will auction it to a new owner, who might cut the rent by double digits or convert the property to another use to fill it back up. Nobody should even start to worry about a Dayton-style abandonment of Manhattan until its office rents fall below Houston’s or Atlanta’s. No foreclosing lender will simply abandon a tower that can still collect Sun Belt Class A rents.

The expensive superstar cities enjoy an advantage accidentally created by bad, anti-growth choices before the pandemic. Like nature, markets abhor a vacuum—and if office rents eventually fall far enough below residential rents, developers in cities starved for housing will find a way to take advantage.

Skinny buildings with lots of windows can easily be turned into apartments, particularly if their current zoning accommodates multifamily residential. But few office towers fit those criteria. In harder cases, extensive and expensive renovations, which in some cases may involve cutting huge lighting and ventilation areas dozens of stories deep, can produce high-end residential units. Cities could also change their building and zoning codes to allow dormitories and rooming houses with shared dorm-style kitchens and bathrooms that wouldn’t require threading in new vertical plumbing stacks for every unit.

Tracy Hadden Loh: Downtown needs to change to survive

Were New York and San Francisco farsighted in creating housing shortages and a “safety buffer” of priced-out people waiting to move in? Certainly not. Nevertheless, they do today in fact have hundreds of thousands of people ready to move in if they loosen their land-use regulations. The waitlist is shorter than in 2019, but NYC alone is still at least 300,000 homes short of demand.

If office rents really plunge, one last option comes into play: Desperate landlords will start renting out gray-market “artist studios” and not checking too carefully to find out whether people are staying overnight. Are unrenovated Class C office-building interiors ideal places to live? Not really. But neither are the large-floorplate 19th-century factories that have long supplied New York’s famous artist lofts. Impractical floor plans and bad plumbing didn’t stop artists from seeking big, cheap, gray-market factory loft studios when Manhattan began deindustrializing in the 1960s. It wasn’t just the 1960s, either; New York regularly updates the Loft Law to catch up with ongoing illegal factory and office loft conversions in the outer boroughs (and last did so in 2019). Although 1970s office buildings aren’t as pretty as lofts in 1870s factories, they’re also safer to live in.

New York and a few other cities have the easy option of changing the rules—or just looking the other way—as underused office buildings turn into apartments. But this alternative isn’t available to cities with more reasonable housing costs and fewer desperate tenants. Not many New Yorkers will shed tears for the incumbent landlords of Manhattan, whose supply-side comeuppance is long deserved, and an “office apocalypse” that lowers rents for start-ups and opens up space for artists could even make the city more vibrant. Instead, national policy makers and urbanists should be worrying about the already-cheap downtowns of cities that cannot survive any more rent cuts.

The post New York Will Be Tremendous. Different Downtowns Have Extra to Worry. appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

For more than a decade, struggling taxi drivers have blamed Uber and Lyft for siphoning off their customers and making a difficult living even harder.

But now traditional cab drivers and contractors who work for ride-hailing apps have united against a common enemy—taxis without any drivers at all.

By November 2022, officials granted so-called robotaxis operated by Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company, and General Motors-owned Cruise permission to serve paying passengers. These robotaxi services have continued to expand rapidly despite concerns about the safety record of driverless vehicles. Autonomous vehicles have prompted outrage by interrupting public emergencies, rolling over a fire hose during a major house fire and, in another instance, narrowly missing a light-rail car. Another killed a small dog. 

In July 2023, a cohort of activists against autonomous vehicles placed traffic cones on the hoods of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis to stop their forward progress. | Courtesy Safe Street Rebel | Source: Courtesy Safe Street Rebel

But taxi and ride-hailing app drivers say robotaxis could have another human cost that’s largely been glossed over. They’re worried that the added competition could mean human drivers could further shrink earnings that they say have been steadily dwindling from rising costs and rate changes. 

“We’re already seeing it,” said Jose Gazo, an Uber driver of seven years who added he finds himself driving longer hours to make less money. “With business going like this, we’re going to go homeless.”

This week, the California Public Utilities Commission, for the second time in a month, delayed a vote scheduled for Thursday that would have allowed autonomous vehicle companies unlimited 24/7 expansion in San Francisco. A chorus of local public safety and transit officials have called for a slowdown in their expansion plans, arguing that self-driving cars have only “met the requirements for a learner’s permit,” not a driver’s license.

Waymo responded that it has about 200 cars providing more than 10,000 rides per week with no collisions involving pedestrians or cyclists on record. A Cruise spokesperson previously touted its safety record to the Standard, noting that it “includes millions of miles driven in an extremely complex urban environment.”  

Driverless Future Overhyped?

None of that has dampened the resistance among drivers against the rise of autonomous vehicles. Taxi and app-based drivers staged a protest outside the commission last month, protesting an imminent expansion of driverless cars with questions about what it means for future work. 

Protestors stand with signs at the protest against robotaxis or self-driving taxis in San Francisco on June 29, 2023. | Jeremy Chen/The Standard

But even if Waymo and Cruise prevail over local safety concerns, experts don’t believe robotaxis will replace human drivers. For one thing, they’re expensive to build. A ride in a Cruise car is slightly cheaper for customers than taking an Uber, but the vehicles outfitted with sensors and cameras cost much more to make than ordinary cars. In response to mounting losses, Cruise told investors in March that it would focus on cutting costs. Ford and Volkswagon pulled the plug on their joint autonomous vehicle venture last fall. 

The companies are also limited by federal law, which says manufacturers are only allowed to produce 2,500 driverless cars apiece per year, though legislation to lift the cap has been proposed. 

Ken Jacobs, chairman of the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education, believes visions of a driverless future have been “grossly overhyped.” 

“The threat isn’t to the number of jobs; it’s to the quality of jobs,” Jacobs told The Standard. “The market left to its own is likely to come out with outcomes that … are bad for workers.” 

Drivers say they are spending more time on the road but are making less from rate adjustments while still covering the cost of gas and maintenance. 

The Rideshare Guy, a popular blog for gig workers, found in January that recent rate changes mean that Uber drivers are making 19%-27% less on long rides. 

On the subject of rate changes, Uber said in California, drivers make median earnings of $38 per engaged hour—not accounting for idle time or driver expenses—and as of a change instituted earlier this year, drivers can now see prospective earnings before accepting rides. Lyft did not respond regarding driver earnings by publication time. 

“We did not see a significant change in per-trip earnings, but we did see an increase in the number of driving hours, suggesting drivers appreciated the changes made,” said an Uber spokesperson of fare changes. “As drivers know, earnings on Uber vary as marketplace conditions change.”

Jason Munderloh, a part-time Lyft driver of nine years, said the company has made some improvements for drivers, like a setting to pick up rides only in the direction they are traveling, but overall, pay has dropped. The advent of autonomous vehicles has him looking at other possible careers, like bartending. 

Lyft driver Jason Munderloh poses for a portrait in his car at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, on Monday July 10, 2023. | Isaac Ceja/The Standard | Source: Isaac Ceja/The Standard

For San Francisco taxi drivers who took out loans for a $250,000 medallion under a program introduced in 2010, the year Uber first arrived on city streets, the prospect of making less money is especially terrifying. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency brought in $64 million through the program, which has since seen 301 foreclosed medallions. It still has 427 paid medallions as of last week. 

The owner of one of them, Brent Johnson, a San Francisco cab driver of 30 years, said with his current income, which he estimates at around minimum wage, he can only afford to pay off the interest on his medallion loan. He’s hoping for restitution, arguing that, since they’re functioning as taxis, autonomous vehicles should pay into the medallion system. But if his loan isn’t taken care of, he is bracing to default as retirement nears. 

“I’m hoping for the best and preparing for the worst,” Johnson said.

There are still over 2,550 drivers with a taxi permit, according to the SFMTA. Spokesperson Stephen Chun said the agency, which has urged data collection on the safety record and environmental and economic effects of autonomous vehicles, is “confident” that taxi drivers will continue to provide critical transportation, like through the paratransit program, in the long term. 

Billy Riggs, a University of San Francisco professor who studies transportation innovation, also sees a long future with a continued need for human drivers. 

“If we’re honest with ourselves, it really does relate to this bigger question of the future of work, the future of cities,” Riggs said. “Transportation, right now, just highlights this.”

Questions, comments or concerns about this article may be sent to info@sfstandard.com

The post San Francisco Drivers Concern the Human Price of Robotaxis appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

A beautiful day in San Francisco

In early January, Una and I headed north over to San Francisco to visit my sister, who was in town for a conference. I figured it might be a nice opportunity to share some thoughts about “the City.” Since first visiting in 1998, I’ve been to San Francisco many times — and yet, for some reason, I’ve never really thought about subjecting it to the Where Fools Fear To Tread treatment. I’m not entirely sure why — perhaps it’s because I’ve been to it so many times already. I usually reserve sharing my hastily formed impressions of places with which I’m less familiar. After all, being too informed about a subject puts one at dangerous risk of having nothing of interest to say.

It’s certainly not because I never think about San Francisco. Although only the forth most populous city in California, my thoughts certainly turn to it more often than they do larger, closer (and similarly canonized) California cities like San Diego or San Jose. I worked for many years at Amoeba, in Hollywood. I was hired and fired by San Franciscans. Many of my co-workers were San Franciscan — something they seemingly never tired of reminding anyone willing to listen. I also have friends in Los Angeles who dream of moving to San Francisco someday. So far, they’ve only gotten as far as Alhambra — literally a lateral move. Anyway, I drew this map for them so that they could find their way around, should they ever get there. Below is a slightly more useful one.

SAN FRANCISCO AND ME

Growing up in the country, I romanticized cities from afar. I didn’t have a word for it, then, but I was an urbanophile (which the red dotted underline tells me isn’t an actual word). If a book, film, or television series depicted alleys, fire escapes, brownstones, skyscrapers, or taxicabs — I was captivated. Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids, the children’s books of Ezra Jack Keats, and The Wiz, were, to me, what My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, or G.I. Joe were to other ’80s kids. Growing up outside of a college town in Central Missouri, the only cities with which I had firsthand familiarity were St. Louis and Kansas City — which struck me as very dissimilar places. This is somewhat strange, in retrospect, because I made little effort to differentiate depictions of North American cities in pop culture. The pastel-tinted Miami of Miami Vice was an exception — but Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, New York City, and San Francisco all easily blended together in my imagination.

I wanted to hit the “fast forward” button on my town, and transform Columbia into a city, although there was little evidence that it was even moving in that direction. Our ten-story Tiger Hotel, built in 1928, had been the first skyscraper built between Kansas City and St. Louis, but decades had passed since then in which a proper skyline should’ve arisen and hadn’t. Instead, we had only a few mid-rise dorms, hospitals, and housing projects. Imagine my excitement when, one day, I saw a sign near Stephen’s College advertising the existence of a subway. Imagine, too, my disappointment when I ran inside but instead of a station platform found only mediocre submarine sandwiches.

San Francisco’s iconic, three-legged 298 meter tall television and radio lattice tower, completed in 1973.

I knew a little of San Francisco as a child. I knew from a relatively early age that it was the city with the Golden Gate Bridge although, since I still wonder, I probably wondered then what was so special about that particular suspension bridge. I mean, it’s a lovely bridge but why isn’t Sutro Tower, which rises over the city like Barad-dûr, just as celebrated?

In 1986, I saw Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in the cinema, a film in which the action is set in San Francisco (which is also the home of Starfleet). I’m pretty sure that I knew what Alcatraz was before the 1989 Unsolved Mysteries episode, “Alcatraz,” because what child hasnn’t fantasize about escaping from an island prison? Then there was Rice-A-Roni, a boxed-food mix that advertised heavily on television when I was growing up and, viewers were informed, is “the San Francisco treat.” The jingle for the food product concluded the ring of a trolley bell in case you needed further proof of the advertiser’s claim. And when I was a teenager, I read works by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, having become curious about beatniks and the Beat Generation after reading old issues of Cracked and Mad Magazine in which they were satirized.

I first visited San Francisco with a college friend, Seth, with whom I was driving around the west in a circuitous route that crisscrossed the Plains, the Rockies, and the West Coast of which Jack Kerouac might’ve approved. We visited Seth’s sister, Gina, who lived in, I think, the Castro. When we arrived at her place, we gingerly stepped over a man sleeping in the small foyer of her building. Gina said that he lived there and was nice, or cool, or something to that effect. We later went out. I don’t remember where — but given Gina and Seth’s musical tastes — it was almost certainly a Britpop club. What I do remember, vividly, is eating a massive, foil wrapped Mission burrito afterward. San Franciscans think that everyone has heard of Mission burritos but in reality, almost no one from outside of Northern California has. It was, in fact, the first time that I’d ever even heard of the Mission. The burrito was good, though. In fact, I remember thinking that it was one of the best things I’d ever eaten. We’d almost certainly been drinking beer. Odds are, too, that we’d smoked some cannabis. Those factors, along with the cold and damp weather, certainly elevated my appreciation for this culinary experience. Still, have you ever had a burrito that you remembered eating 25 years later?

The next day we walked through Haight-Ashbury for some reason — probably to “see the sights.” I remember we went to some middle class kids sitting on a sidewalk yelled at me for not wanting to “change the world” by giving them what little money I had in my wallet. We also went to Fisherman’s Wharf, where I bought a Greek Fisherman’s cap and observed the sea lions and their human counterparts. We rode a trolley.

Me, on one of my many trips to San Francisco in 2008

That’s about all we saw during my first visit, as far as I recall, but I’ve been back since. Even though San Francisco is further away from Los Angeles than San Diego, Las Vegas, or even Phoenix — none of those hold for me nearly as much appeal. In fact, if I could avoid ever going to Las Vegas or Phoenix ever again, I’d be completely fine with that. I’ve driven, flown, and taken the train to San Francisco and none of those options are especially appealing. Only truly sick people enjoy the relentless masochistic unpleasantness of airplane travel. The six or so hour drive along Interstate 5 is pretty dull unless you get a thrill from endless ranches punctuated by the occasional truck stop. The train would be the obvious choice if only it took less than twelve hours — and then only got you to Oakland or Emeryville. Someday, I’ll work up the nerve to take a bánh mì bus. What I’m really looking forward too is the California High-Speed Rail line — currently on-track to open in 2033, which by my calculations, means closer to 2043.

We decided, for this trip, to fly from the Hollywood Burbank Airport (located — despite its name — in the San Fernando Valley and not, therefore, Hollywood) into the San Francisco Airport (located about ten kilometers outside of the City and County of San Francisco in unincorporated San Mateo County). The best that can be said about flying in and out of the airport formerly known as Bob Hope is that it is less unpleasant than flying in and out of the airport still known as Los Angeles International Airport — which holds the distinction of being the busiest American airport without direct rail service — although that will change when the LAX People Mover opens later this year. After that, I could theoretically take the people mover to Metro‘s the K Line to the E Line to the 92 Line. Or, I could do as I do now and just take the LAX Flyaway Bus.

GETTING AROUND SAN FRANCISCO

I suspect strongly, though, that if we’re still above ground in that distant future when the California High Speed Rail is completed that it will be the main choice for travelers between the two cities — and, hopefully someday, extend from Vancouver to Santiago. In the mean time, although getting too San Francisco is a bit of a drag (unless you’ve got time to drive up the coast, ride a bike, or you can charter a hot air balloon), getting around inside San Francisco is an almost joyful experience — especially compared to most other California cities.

The website Walkscore assigns San Francisco a walk score of 89, a transit score of 77, and a bike score of 72. There is BART, MUNI, and if you’re a first-time tourist, the trolleys. I was pleased to see that BART had swapped out its disgusting cloth seats. However, they’ve been replaced with cushiony vinyl seats — which, from the smell of it, still contain the same fart sponges inside that they did before. With vinyl seats, one can at least better gauge whether or not they’re wet but what transit rider wants big, puffy, cushions that are dirtier than a couch thats been tossed from a frat house? If you can stand, I highly recommend it.

As of 2019, there were 69 kilometers of dedicated bus lanes, making bus service in San Francisco pretty good — although bus stops are sometimes not even marked by signs. At our first stop after leaving the BART station, a bus driver assured us that we were standing in the right spot for the bus that we wanted to catch. He told us to make sure, though, that the driver saw us. I thought that this was odd. Wouldn’t a bus driver who sees people standing at an unsheltered bus stop in the rain assume that we weren’t there to install a rain gauge? Just to be safe, I waved my hand at the driver — which he seemed to mistake for a mere friendly gesture and would’ve driven off had not the driver from the other bus stopped in the street, jumped out, and yelled, “YOU HAVE TO STOP!” at the top of his lungs. At this point, the driver of our bus stopped, the other bus driver smiled and waved, and we boarded our bus — piece of cake.

Walking is still my favorite way to get around San Francisco. San Francisco is tiny — just 121 square kilometers. A reasonably able bodied person could walk across it in under two and a half hours. One could walk across it diagonally in under four hours. It is smaller in area than several Los Angeles County cities, including Palmdale, Lancaster, Santa Clarita, and Long Beach. It is, however, for more pleasant to walk through because somehow the good folks of San Francisco have figured out, in most of the city, that there are better uses for land than surface parking lots. In fact, where they could’ve presumably created lifeless seas of asphalt devoted to the storage of empty automobiles — San Franciscans instead have not just storefronts and housing but pedestrian-centered amenities like promenades and plazas, and parks. One of my favorite activities in San Francisco is to aimlessly ramble, stopping here and there for a bite or a drink when it seems like a good idea to. And so, one drizzly evening, Una, my sister, and I, rambled through Yerba Buena Gardens, onto the newish elevated Salesforce Park, along the water by the Bay Bridge and Ferry Building, in and out of an Irish pub, and finally to a ramen place before returning to our hotels.

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge — four times as long as the Golden Gate Bridge — but unloved because it is gray

I’ve never biked in San Francisco but as of 2021, there were 68 kilometers of protected bike lanes and 126 kilometers of off-street paths and trails. There is, naturally, also a train to and from the airport. Weirdly, though, 70.1% of San Franciscans own a car (compared to just 45.6% of New Yorkers) and only 34% regularly use mass transit (compared to 56% of New Yorkers). Maybe it’s because of all of those car chases in San Francisco films and television programs — or maybe its just because there are a lot of freaks — and what’s freakier than owning a car in a city?

CUSINE OF SAN FRANCISICO

Aside from Rice-A-Roni and Mission Burritos, San Francisco’s biggest culinary association is probably with sourdough bread, which — although it didn’t originate there — is apparently popular there in part because of the climate conditions are conducive to baking it. That, and it’s one of the tastier breads — and not just the official bread of the COVID-19 Pandemic. All of those reasons are why a proper Full Californian Breakfast includes sourdough avocado toast.

There are surely some people who can convince themselves that poop everywhere is just part of the city’s rugged “charm.” Just as surely, there are those who can convince themselves that building more public restroom’s would be an affront to the perfection of God’s Kingdom and that we should wait until death to enjoy our rewards for life amongst the feces. Both, I suspect, are in their own separate ways, equally misguided shills for Neoliberalism, which its adherents would have us believe, will lead to benign corporate benefactors picking up the slack from reduced government services. And yet, every quasi-public restroom in San Francisco seems permanently adorned with an “out of service” sign — since minimum wage-paid restaurant service workers understandably don’t want to take on the janitorial needs of the city. And I have never seen a public restroom in San Francisco — paid for by the city, benevolent philanthropists, or sponsored by corporations. The internet tells me that there are, in fact, about 140… in a city of over 800,000 residents… that, in no COVID years receives about 26 million tourists. I wonder, perhaps, if that’s not enough. Maybe, this city — with the fourth highest GMP in the US — can spare a few bucks on some facilities.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO

Whatever one may think, now, it’s fair to say that San Francisco was definitely California’s first true city. Contrary to popular belief, there were huge metropolises in the Americas prior to the Spanish Conquest. However, indigenous Californians nearly all lived in small villages. Archaeological evidence suggests that humans lived in the San Francisco Bay region since at least 3000 BCE. When the Spanish arrived, they encountered the Yelamu, who lived in several villages on the peninsula.

Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo claimed all of California for the Spanish Empire but sailed right past the bay before turning back at Russian River and missing it again on his way home. Subsequent Spanish and English explorers also missed the bay, which when glimpsed from the foggy sea can appear solid where there is in fact water. It wasn’t until 1769, when Catalonian explorer Gaspar de Portolà i Rovira arrived in an overland expedition, that a European set eyes on San Francisco Bay. Spain established the Presidio Real de San Francisco there on 29 June 1776, its second in Alta California following the presidio of San Diego. The Misión San Francisco de Asís was founded there on 9 October 1776.

In 1821, both the presidio and mission were ceded to the newly independent Mexico and a community developed known as Yerba Buena. The Mexican period was short-lived, though, and in 1848, the US invaded and conquered a third of the country, including all of California. Statehood was hastily granted in 1850. By then, thanks to the Gold Rush of 1848, San Francisco was suddenly booming. In 1848 alone, the population increased from roughly 1,000 to 25,000, making it by far the most populous place in California. By contrast, in 1850, San Diego was home to about 650 people and Los Angeles a mere 1,610.

The discovery of silver in the 1850s fueled more immigration and migration and by 1860, the population had more than doubled, reaching 56,802. The first transcontinental railroad arrived in 1869 and the 1870 census counted 149,473, making it the first West Coast city on the top ten most populous American cities — which, no doubt, is part of the reason San Francisco still resembles, in many ways, an outpost of the Northeast more than it does Fresno or Sacramento. In the 1870s, San Francisco overtook New Orleans. In the 1880s, it climbed past Cleveland and Cincinnati.

San Francisco began to slip in the population rankings in the 1890s. The first train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, operated by Southern Pacific, had opened in 1876 led to many San Franciscans migrating south. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway arrived in Los Angeles in 1887, fueling its first real estate boom as many migrants from the Middle West and East — and immigrants from China, India, Japan, and Mexico — began to favor Los Angeles in growing numbers — not just for the weather (which I don’t like as much as San Francisco’s, personally) but because anti-union bosses found it harder to operate in labor-controlled San Francisco than in “open shop” Los Angeles. Meanwhile, San Francisco was surpassed in population by Buffalo. The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire devastated the city. San Francisco would never again appear in the Top Ten.

LITERARY SAN FRANCISCO

It’s been established that many San Franciscans are unlikely to have read any books by Angelenos or that even acknowledge the existence of a California south of latitude 35°45′. Luckily, though, San Francisco does have a rich literary history and one of my favorite things to do there — or in any city — is visit its bookstores and libraries. San Francisco has 27 branch libraries and even more bookstores. The San Francisco Bay Area is home to more than three dozen publishers. The Beat Generation were, first and foremost, authors — and although Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs all met one another in New York City; Ginsberg, Huncke, and Kerouac all moved to San Francisco, where they were key figures in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s. San Francisco’s best known bookstore, City Lights Bookstore, opened in 1953 and was named after the 1931 Hollywood film of the same name. Its name is so well known, that it inspired other bookstores that I’ve also shopped, like Iowa City‘s Prairie Lights Bookstore (opened in 1978) — but not, the internet has just regretfully informed me, Los Feliz’s Skylight Books, which is apparently named after a small live theater located behind its predecessor, Chatterton’s Bookshop. I didn’t visit City Lights on this trip but I spent some time there last year, before my San Francisco-loving friends for whom I made the San Francisco neighborhood map (and one of whom is a librarian) dragged me to their home away from home, Vesuvio Cafe, an historic bar located on the other side of an alley from the book store that first opened in 1948.

BARS OF SAN FRANCISCO

Books and bars go together like peas and carrots and some of my fondest, if foggiest, memories of San Francisco are rooted in them. I can’t remember what all of them were, naturally. I’ve popped into a few because walking is the most rewarding way to traverse San Francisco (just mind the turds) and there is a truly enviable bar density. You walk, you get thirsty, need to pee, or need to rest for a minute and there’s inevitably a great bar to pop into and eventually, out of. And there’s seemingly really good pizza slice everywhere, which it’s a good idea to re-up with between stops at watering holes.

I remember one in North Beach were I was taken in by a colorful bunch of barflies. I asked them how long they’d lived in San Francisco and one defiantly replied, “I don’t. I live in North Beach!” There were a bunch of Bavarians singing loudly for much of the night and when friends came to drag me away, the barflies tumbled outside, calling, “Come back tomorrow!” I didn’t. I’m not even sure if it’s there anymore. It was across from Vesuvio, if memory serves (and it may not).

One this visit, Una, my sister, and I popped in and out of a few bars walking here and there. Sometimes I’d have a stout, sometimes a cider. In the past I’ve had Irish Coffee, invented in 1952 at the Buena Vista Cafe. At one I had my first beer cocktail which, if memory serves, had Grenadine or something in it. In Los Angeles, for reasons unknown to me, I have been asked if I’m from San Francisco when I order a Fernet-Branca. I do know that Fernet-Branca is most popular in Argentina. No one in San Francisco has ever asked me, after I order Fernet, whether or not I’m Argentine or local — but I get the sense that it’s very popular. When I ordered some this time, Una tried it, made a face, shook, and said that it tasted like medicine. Yes. Yes it does.

SAN FRANCISCO SOUND

After the Beat Generation, the next big moment in San Francisco culture was the development of the San Francisco Sound — which was closely associated with folkies, hippies, freaks, and flower children. You’ve seen the documentaries about the ’60s. When they get to San Francisco, you see shots of young Bohemians and Scott McKenzie‘s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair” inevitably plays as a narrator with a voice like Peter Coyote‘s waxes nostalgically about magic and innocence and change in the air. The most iconic band of the bunch is surely Jefferson Airplane, which in a later incarnation sang that they “built this city on rock and roll.” Being true San Franciscans, they never specified which city because “this city,” like “the city” is what San Franciscans would like to think we’re all in agreement on. Similarly, “the Bay” means the San Francisco Bay, and not one of the other 1,285 bays. But because this song was popular when I was in the Death Metal capital, which happens to be on a bay, I somehow convinced myself that the song’s DJ (in reality, Les Garland), when he mentions “your favorite radio city, the city by the bay, the city that never sleeps,” I came to the decidedly unlikely conclusion that the Starship were singing about Tampa-St. Petersburg.

I think it was Kasey Kasem who disabused me of my silly supposition when, on his Weekly Top 40, he hipped us youngsters to the fact that Starship had formed out of Jefferson Starship, which in turn had formed out of Jefferson Airplane. Eleven year old me was gobbling up anything psychedelic that I could find so I, of course, came to appreciate Jefferson Airplane — and, eventually, other San Francisco Bay Area bands of that era like The Ace of Cups, The Beau Brummels, Blue Cheer, The Chocolate Watchband, Count Five, Country Joe & the Fish, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fifty Foot Hose, Flamin’ Groovies, The Great Society, Moby Grape, Powder, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone. For some reason, though, I could never get into The Grateful Dead. I actually once thought that I heard a song of theirs that I liked but it turned out to be The Jerry Garcia Band. There’s no point in trying to “get into” a band that you don’t like, though, any more than there’s some reward for trying to get into a medicinal digestif that you hate the taste of.

The San Francisco Sound faded away in the 1970s and yet, there are San Francisco bands that I am not surprised are from San Francisco like The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Deerhoof, Faith No More, 4 Non Blondes, Girls, Jellyfish, Negativeland, The Residents, The Tubes, and Xiu Xiu. There are groups, too, that I know are associated with San Franciso Bay Area, even if I don’t necessarily hear anything overtly San Francisco Bay Area about them — bands like American Music Club, Journey, Red House Painters, and Tower of Power. Then there are performers I have to be reminded are associated with San Francisco, like Dave Brubeck, The Doobie Brothers, Huey Lewis & the News, Los Tigres del Norte, Malo, Metallica, Pointer Sisters, Romeo Void, The Rubinoos, and The Steve Miller Band. There’s Red 7, who I have to be reminded are neither Peter Gabriel nor Phil Collins-era Genesis. And then there are bands from San Francisco that mainly San Franciscans like, bands like The Avengers, Crime, Tuxedomoon, and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 (although the latter were also popular in Iowa City).

Starry Eyed Cadet with Lillian Yee in 2017

Of course, I’ve seen a few San Francisco Bay act perform live, too, including The Aislers Set, Digital Underground (at what Shock G/Humpty Hump called “Mini-Freaknik”, Erase Errata, Mark Kozelek, and Numbers. I saw the Bay Area’s Sky Faction and Starry Eyed Cadet perform in San Francisco, for bonus points. I was also in a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club video, wearing a yellow Denim T-shirt, although I don’t think that you can make me out. I had become a fan after seeing them perform as if headlining Glastonbury with about five other people at a supper club. And Ride, although not from San Francisco, played one of my favorite shows ever when they performed at the Warfield in 2015. Although we didn’t see any live music on this trip, we did pass by the Fillmore after giving up on finding breakfast in Japantown and headed south. And, like any right-minded person, I made a San Francisco Bay Area playlist that I listened to almost exclusively.

Hip-hop is a bit of a different story as far as Bay Area music goes. Rappers are generally keen to remind you of where they’re from, what their name is, and (although less frequently now), what the year of their recording is. Sometimes you have to connect the dots. Oakland’s Luniz, in “5 On It,” sampled “Why You Treat Me So Bad,” by Club Nouveau, who were from Sacramento but who grew out of Oakland’s Timex Social Club. Too Short rapped that he came from “the city of dope” that “couldn’t be saved by John the Pope,” which I guess listeners were supposed to know meant Oakland, or, erm, Oaktown. MC Hammer had a song called “Oaktown,” which was more straight forward. Other rappers like E-40 and Mac Dre adopted a mannered rapping style that signified, we came to know, that they were from the Bay Area. They said things like “hella” and “hyphy” and tried to make “Mobb Music” a thing but, for reasons I don’t really understand, they were all very popular in Kansas City, where many music stores often had Oakland sections, and where many local rappers sounded like they were from Oakland (although not, it should be noted, the underrated Mass 187, who sounded decidedly like they were from Houston).

Finally, although few listeners today would associate it with hip-hop, Freestyle music, was born in New York where it was popularized by Puerto Ricans and often referred to as Latin Hip-Hop. By the time it blew up in Florida, it had shed a lot of its hip-hop aspects and was described by some as “synth salsa.” Long after it vanished from the charts, it was kept alive by Filipinos, in many case from the San Francisco Bay Area, including Jocelyn Enriquez, Damien Bautista, Kuya, Pinay, Buffy (Solango), Kim Del Fierro, Sharyn Maceren, One Vo1ce — most of whom recorded for either Burlingame’s Classified Records or San Francisco’s Velocity Records.

SAN FRANCISCO DIVERSITY

San Francisco is a highly diverse city. There is no “racial” majority. As of 2020, 41.9% of residents were non-Latino whites of any ethnicity. San Francisco is home to the country’s third-most Jewish population, per capita, after New York City and Los Angeles. Most are Russian Jews. Russian is the most-spoken language after Taishanese, Cantonese, Spanish, and Tagolog. Judaism is the second most practiced religion, after Christianity. Multiracial San Franciscans accounted for 9.9% of the population. 5.3% were black. .7% of the population identified as Native American or Alaskan Native. .4% were Pacific Islanders. 8.4% of residents self-identified as being of an “other” race. 15.6% of residents were Latino of any race — primarily Mexican and Salvadoran.

JAPANTOWN

View of Japantown from our hotel room

33.9% of San Franciscans were, as of the last census, Asian — primarily Chinese (mostly with roots in Guangdong or Guangzhou), Filipinos, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean. San Francisco is home to a Chinatown, a Little Saigon, and a Japantown — which is where Una chose to stay.

Japantown restaurants still closed after 10:00 am

Japantown is nice. It covers about six blocks and is fairly dense with Japanese businesses and restaurants — none of which seem to open early enough for breakfast, however. We stayed at the Hotel Kabuki, which afforded a view of the Yoshiro Taniguchi-designed San Francisco Peace Pagoda and, next to it, the Japan Center.

CHINATOWN

We met up with my sister and walked around Chinatown. A woman tried to convince us to buy some shíshī that looked like they weighed a couple of tons. “Just lift with the legs,” I thought to myself. One half of a young white couple exclaimed, to our amusement, “There’s gotta be a boba place around here!” I’m sure there is some boba in Chinatown — if perhaps less than there is outside — just as sure as I am that there are Taiwanese there. However, if China would just recognize Taiwan‘s independence (declared in 1895) you wouldn’t have an epidemic of sad young people stumbling around Chinatown looking for Taiwanese beverages and only finding Jasmine green tea.

San Francisco’s Chinatown is one of the most famous in the world. It’s said to be the oldest Chinatown in North America and the largest outside of China — and who am I do dispute that? It is so large, in part, because it is so old. Most East Asians favor Los Angeles over San Francisco because it is the largest American city across the Pacific from Asia and is home to a uniquely Pan-Asian Angeleno culture. Los Angeles has the US’s largest Burmese, Indonesian, and Mongolian populations. It has the largest communities (outside of their respective homelands) of Cambodians, Filipinos, Koreans, Taiwanese, Thai, and Vietnamese. And while there are an estimated 437,680 Chinese in Los Angeles, the percentage San Francisco’s Chinese population — some 22% — is the largest in the US.

The distinction between Los Angeles and San Francisco’s Chinatowns is due, in large part, to the fact that many of San Francisco’s Chinese came during the Gold Rush and to work on the railroads and back then, San Francisco was the primary point of entry on the West Coast. Smaller numbers made their way south, finding agricultural work or jobs in the region’s numerous by comparatively tiny Chinatowns. San Francisco’s Chinatown was established and thriving whereas in Southern California, a mere two hundred or so Chinese were often scapegoated or worse. Several of Orange County’s Chinatowns were burned to the ground and in Los Angeles’s Old Chinatown — later completely obliterated to make way for Union Station and the Hollywood Freeway — nineteen Chinese were brutally lynched by a mob in 1871. Although a new Chinatown arose in the 1930s, close to have of Los Angeles’s Chinese arrived after the 1968 enacting of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and many of those favored the suburbs over Downtown Los Angeles’s Chinese enclave.

Despite its age and size, San Francisco’s Chinatown feels insular. There are, not surprisingly, the tourist-oriented shops but it feels inward looking — unconcerned, largely, with how tourists might perceive it and uninterested in drawing them in beyond the trinket shops and restaurants. Elderly people gambling in Portsmouth Square are seemingly equally unconcerned by the presence of pigeons or police. Many people loudly clear their throats and spit. Even more just quietly go about their business.

QUEER SAN FRANCISCO

San Francisco has long famously been a center in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transexual rights movements. It was the birthplace of the nation’s first lesbian rights organization, Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955. Guy Strait and José Sarria formed the League for Civil Education around 1960 and in 1961, Sarria became the first openly gay person to run for public office in the US when he ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Adrian Ravarour founded Vanguard which protested for gay rights in 1966. That same year, a group of trans rioted and protested police harassment at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria. Margo Rila and Frank Esposito organized the bisexual rights group, the Sexual Freedom League, in 1967. The Cockettes formed at the Kaliflower Commune in 1969. The Castro emerged as San Francisco’s gayborhood in the 1970s. The San Francisco Bisexual Center opened in 1976. In 1977, when Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, he became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. He was assassinated by a former city supervisor in 1978 who, upon release from prison in 1984, killed himself the following year.

SAN FRANCISCO CULTURE

If I ever enjoy a longer stay in San Francisco, I’d love to take advantage of its many arts organizations and museums. I visited the Cable Car Museum once but the intense smell of oil (following an oily meal in Chinatown) made it extremely difficult for me not to vomit and I had to seek refuge in a nearby library. I did thoroughly enjoy the exhibits at the airport — something more cities should do to make flying in and out of airports a less miserable experience. Yes, SFO has art exhibits, thanks to the SFO Museum Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum and Library.

Some day I’d like to check out the American Conservatory Theater, the Asian Art Museum,the California Academy of Sciences, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the de Young Museum, the Exploratorium, the Morrison Planetarium, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Ballet, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Symphony, the the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, and Steinhart Aquarium (all of which I’m listing, primarily, so that I’ll have a list for next time).

SAN FRANCISCO IN RADIO, TELEVISION, AND FILM

I always wish that airplanes offered curated music and video playlists based on where they were flying. Maybe it’s just me, but I like to get a dramatized taste of a place before I go there. Before Dragnet, Jack Webb made two radio series, Pat Novak, for Hire (1946-1947) and Johnny Madero, Pier 23 (1947). Pat Novak, for Hire is truly amazing — and certainly one of the best programs Webb was ever part of. Although good, there are only two episodes of Johnny Madero, Pier 23 known to exist today.

As far as television series, I have seen every episode of Monk — many more than one time. This will probably surprise few people who know me and who are also familiar with the show. I loved Sledgehammer when it aired — although I have no idea whether or not it holds up. I have a feeling I’d enjoy The Streets of San Francisco because I like most 1970s crime dramas, clavinets, and Karl Malden. I just know there’s got to be an episode about a random sniper and probably some sick spree killer.

Someday, I should make a point of watching the Taiwanese series, 雙城故事, because it’s always interesting to see American culture through a foreign lens… and because a map of San Francisco seems to feature prominently in the life of the main character.

I’ve seen quite a few more films set in San Francisco, although not, in some cases, primarily filmed there. It’s a backdrop in some of the best Hollywood productions. Vertigo, which I saw at a young age, has always been one of my favorite films. Alfred Hitchcock famously fell for San Francisco in 1939, when he was filming Rebecca. He returned to the San Francisco Bay area and Northern California for Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Birds (1963), and Family Plot (1976). Hitchcock probably loved San Francisco for some of the reasons that I do — and for the same reasons that many film noire were set there. Foggy, urban, and dark — it’s a natural setting for noir (although there’s something to be said for finding the noir in sunny Southern California) Some of my favorites were filmed (or at least set) in San Francisco, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Out of the Past (1947), Woman on the Run (1950), Sudden Fear (1952), and The Bigamist (1953).

Other San Francisco films I’ve enjoyed, to varying degrees and which should be offered on all flights to the city include Point Blank (1967), Bullitt (1968), The Love Bug (1969), Dirty Harry (1971), Harold and Maude (1971), The Conversation (1974), Basic Instinct (1992), Kuffs (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993), Interview with the Vampire (1994), The Other Sister (1999), The Room (2003), and Zodiac (2007).

Honestly, the climate is one of my absolute favorite things about San Francisco. The quote “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco” is often attributed to the great Missourian author and wit, Mark Twain, although he probably never said it. Because the quote is clever and about an American place, it’s wrongly attributed to Twain in the same way that it would be attributed to Oscar Wilde were it about summer in Glasgow, which some say is the nicest day of the Scottish year.

Twain did write, after first visiting San Francisco in 1863:

“The birds, and the flowers, and the Chinamen, and the winds, and the sunshine, and all things that go to make life happy, are present in San Francisco to-day, just as they are all days of the year.”

And Wilde wrote, after first visiting San Francisco in 1882:

“It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.”

Support Eric Brightwell on Patreon

Eric Brightwell is an adventurer, essayist, rambler, explorer, cartographer, and guerrilla gardener who is always seeking paid writing, speaking, traveling, and art opportunities. He is not interested in generating advertorials, cranking out clickbait, or laboring away in a listicle mill “for exposure.”

Brightwell has written for Angels Walk LA, Amoeblog, Boom: A Journal of California, diaCRITICS, Hidden Los Angeles, and KCET Departures. His art has been featured by the American Institute of Architects, the Architecture & Design Museum, the Craft Contemporary, Form Follows Function, Los Angeles County Store, the book Sidewalking, Skid Row Housing Trust, and the 1650 Gallery.

Brightwell has been featured as subject and/or guest in The Los Angeles Times, VICE, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, LAist, CurbedLA, Office Hours Live, Spectrum News, Eastsider LA, Boing Boing, Los Angeles, I’m Yours, Notebook on Cities and Culture, KCRW‘s Which Way, LA?, at Emerson College, and the University of Southern California.

Brightwell is currently writing a book about Los Angeles.

You can follow him on Ameba, Duolingo, Facebook, Goodreads, iNaturalist, Instagram, Mastodon, Medium, Mubi, the StoryGraph, and Twitter.

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Boudin derangement syndrome: Since taking office in 2020, the DA has become the locus of a corporate backlash. (Courtesy of the Recall Chesa Boudin campaign)

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After just two years in office, Chesa Boudin, the district attorney of San Francisco, gets blamed for every crime in the book—even offenses committed before he took office and beyond the city limits. For his efforts to tackle wage theft, end cash bail, expand the program that diverts nonviolent offenders from prison, and prosecute abusive cops, Boudin has been rewarded with a recall campaign scapegoating him for all of this city’s woes. The vote takes place on June 7, and recent polls suggest it will be an uphill battle for Boudin and progressives.

Loaded with cash from local billionaires, Big Tech, and other corporate interests, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and an allied group called San Franciscans for Public Safety have poured a whopping $5.1 million into the campaign to recall Boudin. Real estate interests have also kicked in, including more than $600,000 from Shorenstein Realty Services, a major local developer. As the Democratic strategist Cooper Teboe told Forbes, Boudin is “the unfortunate recipient of all of the anger from the investor class and the billionaire class.” The recall’s top funder is the Republican billionaire William Oberndorf, who donated $3.7 million to federal candidates in 2020—mostly to Republicans, including Senators Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton.

While Boudin is the primary target, this centrist uprising first came to public attention in February when it spearheaded the recall of three school board members (a campaign that was financed heavily by Oberndorf and the billionaire investor Arthur Rock). Next came electoral threats to progressive supervisors who didn’t support the school board recall, revealing a larger political agenda. Then, in late April, corporate interests mounted a gerrymandering effort that could put some supervisor districts in the centrist camp. And now, the furious push to recall Boudin.

“There is a big money effort to roll back progressive politics in San Francisco,” says Tim Redmond, founder and editor of the progressive news site 48 Hills, who has covered politics here since 1986.

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Propelling this movement is a well-financed narrative that has insinuated itself into local media and politics—and a sizable portion of the electorate. This narrative blames San Francisco progressives for complex crises whose causes reach back decades and far beyond the city line. The writer Michael Shellenberger, who’s making an improbable run for the California governor’s office, bizarrely blames the left for the city’s ills in his book San Fransicko, with its bombastic subtitle: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

At the heart of this reactionary movement is a misdiagnosis of genuine problems. Burgeoning homelessness and drug addiction here are preventable tragedies. Housing costs are among the highest in the nation, with the median single-family home priced at $2 million, far out of reach for most people. The city also hosts the world’s greatest concentration of billionaires, and the Bay Area is home to California’s most glaring inequality, with the top 10 percent of earners raking in 12.2 times what folks in the bottom 10 percent make.

While progressives have often held a majority in the city’s legislature, they haven’t had a mayoral ally since Art Agnos lost to conservative Frank Jordan in 1991; the city’s “strong mayor” charter also adds to centrists’ power when they control the executive branch. Rising homelessness, addiction, and crime are the result of national and regional crises, including woefully insufficient spending on supportive housing for homeless people. Redmond says the current scapegoating is “a total distraction from the fundamental inequalities in the US and in San Francisco.” If anything, progressive policies like the city’s living wage ordinance, universal health care access, rent control, tenants’ rights laws, and taxes on extreme wealth have blunted these crises.

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Chasing Chesa, Fomenting Fear

When he was elected in November 2019, Boudin was hailed as a bright new star in a wave of reforming district attorneys that included Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Rachael Rollins in the Boston area, and Kim Foxx in Cook County, Ill. All have faced criticism, but the backlash in San Francisco has been particularly virulent, prompting pundits to label it “Chesa Boudin Derangement Syndrome.” As the San Francisco Examiner writer Gil Duran described it, “Every crime trend—even those pre-dating his tenure—can somehow be blamed on him. Car burglarized? Blame Boudin. Walgreens and CVS closing hundreds of stores nationwide? Boudin’s fault. National fentanyl epidemic? Thanks, Boudin. Police not making enough arrests? Boudin hurt their morale.” One recent recall campaign ad featured a man who closed his store because of drug dealing—but a reporter revealed that the business had been shuttered before Boudin was elected.

San Francisco has its share of urban problems. But analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle found that “reported crime data does not clearly show a trend toward worsening public safety.” Even as crimes like car break-ins have increased in the city (as they have statewide and beyond), violent crimes are way down. But that hasn’t stopped the fearmongers from fanning a political wildfire.

The typically center-right Chronicle surprised locals with a strong editorial against the recall, arguing, “Crime stats that mirror those of when Boudin took office do not justify a recall. Violent crime is low and has stayed low even as it has surged across the country…. Cities across the country—regardless of their criminal justice approach—have struggled after COVID lockdowns lifted.” The Examiner and the local Democratic Party also reject the recall, as have many former prosecutors and judges.

Blaming the victims: Municipal workers trash an encampment of unhoused people just a few blocks from San Francisco’s City Hall. (Christopher D. Cook)

Scapegoating Homeless People

On a recent afternoon, across the street from a shining new glass tower of condos for sale a few blocks from City Hall, city workers descended on tents arrayed neatly on the sidewalk’s edge. A burly public works employee snatched and tossed a silver tent onto a platform truck, atop other “junk” bound for the dump.

“The man that lives in there is a 65-year-old dude who’s out on a medical appointment,” a fellow tent dweller, an amply tattooed Marine veteran, told me. “It’s our constitutional right to live here, to have a home. You can’t take that away from us,” he urged the workers in an increasingly irate voice. When I asked who’s demanding the tent removals, city workers insisted, “The mayor, London Breed.”

Trashing an elderly homeless man’s shelter and belongings—a violation of city policy, advocates tell me—is brutally familiar in this city, where “there are more anti-homeless laws than in any other city in the state,” says Jennifer Friedenbach, the longtime director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “Homelessness in San Francisco is a popular wedge issue,” she continues. “And politicians—Shellenberger no exception—stoke fear of homeless people to get their name in the paper…. Homeless people, drug dealers, and criminals are all lumped together and scapegoated.”

A Twitter account named “BetterSOMA” (referencing the South of Market area) posts photographs of homeless people shooting up or crumpled on the sidewalk, a humiliating public exposure that could haunt these people’s futures. When I confronted the group about this practice, BetterSOMA and its acolytes came at me like piranhas. As one put it, “It should be humiliating. They should be shamed. If you coddle street addicts, MORE SHOW UP and are lured into depravity.” Another insisted, “They are drug addicts. Their dignity went out the window before the photos pal.”

The pandemic has only intensified the street crises, Friedenbach says. “People have been out there for two years—their [precarity] has gotten much worse, their drug use much worse.” Meanwhile, Friedenbach sees a growing “promotion of tried-and-failed strategies” such as criminalization and forcing homeless mentally ill people into institutions through conservatorship. The forces behind the recall campaign, she adds, “are complaining about homelessness and then fighting against the solutions,” citing Mayor Breed’s opposition to voter-approved measures to expand funding for homeless services and shelters.

As the writer Gray Brechin, founder of the Living New Deal, puts it, “The question isn’t asked enough: Why are people taking so many drugs? To dull the pain of living in this incredibly cruel society. At the root of it is poverty,” he says, and “a dystopic neoliberal environment that is guaranteed to drive people insane” while living on the streets.

Follow the Money

Fueling this city’s centrist octopus is an engine of big money—largely from Big Tech, real estate, and other corporate interests. And these efforts reach beyond the recalls: As 48 Hills documented, Oberndorf has given at least $300,000 to Neighbors for a Better San Francisco—money spent campaigning against progressive candidates and measures. In 2020, the group and its corporate allies—all aligned with Mayor Breed—spent big to oppose Proposition I, a real estate transfer tax on the wealthiest property owners to help fund emergency aid and affordable housing in the pandemic. (Voters approved the measure by a large margin and rejected several centrist candidates.)

The centrist constellation includes tech-funded groups like GrowSF, AdvanceSF (whose leadership is a who’s who from the Chamber of Commerce), and the YIMBY (“Yes in My Back Yard”) movements pushing a maximal growth agenda that includes “streamlining” environmental reviews to spur more building, principally of market-rate housing. This agenda is part of what the writer Rebecca Solnit calls the “free-market fundamentalism” that has become a local religion. “The constant narrative going on for decades is that if we just build enough buildings, housing will become affordable,” Solnit told me. “But we have more than 40,000 vacant units here,” she notes, citing a city report. “We have a distribution problem, not a supply problem.”

Observing this array of centrist and big money groups, Redmond concludes, “They’re all connected, and the money proves that. Politics takes money, and they’ve got the money.” He adds, “Well-financed efforts at framing the debate have had an effect.”

In April, after many epic late-night hearings, the city’s Redistricting Task Force finalized a new electoral map that could favor centrist district supervisors at the expense of progressive stalwarts like Connie Chan, another target of real estate interests. In an e-mail obtained by 48 Hills, the real estate developer Nick Podell, a board member of Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, crowed, “For the 1st time in the 40 years that I’ve lived in the City, there is a large coordinated centrist/moderate movement to take on Progressive power.” That effort, Podell wrote, is poised to “flip 3 districts with Progressive Supervisors to moderate majorities.” The local Republican leader Richie Greenberg cheered the centrist map, writing, “Connie Chan is TOAST.”

San Francisco is chronically conflicted. A nominally liberal town where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 10-fold, it is also a historical hub of finance capital, extreme wealth accumulation, and corporate profit, which all fuel (and fund) a moderate and sometimes conservative politics, particularly on economic issues. Since the Gold Rush, says Solnit (who has lived here since 1980), San Francisco “has always had a progressive wing and a corporate moderate wing. Because Republicans don’t have traction here, people think of us as this quasi-socialist utopia, but it’s not true…. Now we have millionaires buying elections through recalls.” As the Examiner columnist Lincoln Mitchell explains, the city’s rich and powerful “are not always conservative or right wing, but they have a vision that is distinctly not progressive.” Their “moderate-to-conservative vision,” Mitchell says, “is one where businesses and developers are empowered and given incentives to operate more or less how they like, where fear of crime is fetishized, and where homelessness is understood as a problem not of human suffering but as a quality-of-life issue for the housed.”

Crisis conditions: Two years into the pandemic, precarity, poverty, addiction, and inequality have only gotten worse. (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Big Tech’s Shadow

The writer and activist Roberto Lovato offers a scathing diagnosis of his native city’s neoliberal tilt, pointing to Silicon Valley’s ethos of “digital Darwinism.” The recalls, Lovato explains, show the cumulative effects of Big Tech’s power: “You’re looking at what Silicon Valley did over all these years, the near-totalitarian control of the body politic of San Francisco.” This “greed machine,” he argues, is manufacturing “a normalization of displacement…. One way to do it is to reengineer the political system.”

“There’s a fascistic cruelty beneath the shiny silicon surface of San Francisco,” Lovato says—one that displaces communities and cultures in the name of relentless growth and profit. “All my friends who grew up here have been displaced. The organic growth of the Mission [District] that created the largest concentration of murals in the world has been displaced by gentrification and tech workers buying $14 burritos…. They use our murals to push us out.”

“Tech has such a libertarian tendency,” Solnit says, “but a lot of it is economically regressive. We don’t have the language to express how many of these folks are Burning Man libertarians while being economic Republicans.” Tech’s predominance here, she adds, has cultural as well as political implications: “Everything is DoorDashed and smartphoned; it’s a much more mediated experience. The desire to avoid human contact has been such a part of the tech culture—the desire to live in one of the most densely urban centers in the country while being hostile to much of that life.”

Even amid this centrist uprising, San Francisco progressives have mustered some positive changes. A voter-approved tax on vacant storefronts took effect in January, and activists are preparing a ballot measure to tax up to 40,000 vacant residential units to pressure landlords to fill them (a similar effort worked well in Vancouver). In March, the city enacted a groundbreaking law enabling tenants to form union-like associations to bargain with landlords. It’s also worth remembering that in 2019, city voters elected Boudin on the platform of criminal justice reform that he’s now implementing. On June 7 and beyond, voters here have a chance to reject this corporate-funded reactionary movement. San Francisco, as always, remains intensely contested terrain.

The post Worry & Loathing in San Francisco: How Chesa Boudin Obtained Blamed appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

People who live in the scenic woodlands of Northern California faced a weekend of fear as forest fires threatened to devastate thousands of homes.

The Dixie Fire, which burned much of the gold rush town of Greenville, threatened more than 10,000 buildings in the northern Sierra Nevada. It had engulfed an area larger than the size of New York City.

It was the largest current wildland fire in the country and the third largest in recorded California history, according to the State Department of Fire and Forestry Protection.

Wind-blown flames destroyed dozens of homes and most of downtown Greenville on Wednesday and Thursday, and also badly damaged Canyondam, a hamlet of about three dozen residents. The fire reached Chester, but crews managed to protect homes and businesses there, officials said.

Charlene Mays kept her Chester gas station open as long as possible and urged tired firefighters not to apologize for the ash trail their boots had left on the ground. But when the small town on the northwest shore of Lake Almanor lost power, Mays decided it was time for them to leave.

She ran home to get a box of valuables, including her husband’s class ring and some jewelry. The smoke was so thick it was hard to breathe. Lumps of ash broke when they hit the floor, making a sound like broken glass.

That was two days ago. Since then, Mays has lived in the car park at Lassen College in Susanville. Her husband stayed behind to service some of the water tanks that the firefighters were using. It’s just her, a Miniature Pinscher Chihuahua named Jedidiah and a Pit Bull named Bear.

Her house was still standing on Friday, but her fate was tied to the direction of the wind. She wasn’t alone.

“I have probably 30 of my regular customers here,” she said.

The Dixie Fire, named for the street it began on, now covers an area of ​​1,760 square kilometers and was only 21% contained. No injuries or deaths were reported.

The weather at the fireplace on Saturday was expected to have higher humidity and calmer winds with temperatures in excess of 32 degrees Celsius instead of the 40 miles per hour (64 km / h) gusts recorded at the beginning of the week and three-digit highs.

Still, the fire and its neighboring fires, which were only a few hundred miles apart, posed an ongoing threat.

Heat waves and historic droughts related to climate change have made fighting forest fires in the American West difficult. Scientists say climate change has made the region much warmer and drier over the past 30 years, and the weather will continue to be more extreme and forest fires more frequent and more destructive.

Near the Klamath National Forest, firefighters kept an eye out for small communities evacuated on the trail of the antelope fire, which had previously ignited 30-meter-high flames as it blackened bone-dry grass, scrub and wood. It was only included 20%.

Farther northwest, around 500 homes scattered in and around Shasta-Trinity National Forest remained threatened by the Monument Fire and others by the McFarland Fire, both of which were triggered by thunderstorms last week, firefighters said.

About a two-hour drive south of the Dixie Fire, crews had encircled about a third of the River Fire that broke out near the city of Colfax on Wednesday and destroyed nearly 90 homes and other buildings. Evacuations for thousands of people in the Nevada and Placer counties were lifted Friday. Authorities said three people, including a firefighter, were injured.

Dale Huber went to the fire zone on Friday to check on his brother’s house, which was in ruins.

“It used to be a bunch of cool things, and now it’s just rubbish,” said Huber. “You can’t fix it. We can rip it out and start over or run away. I think he decided to rebuild here. “

Smoke from the fires covered central California and western Nevada, causing air quality to deteriorate to very unhealthy levels. Air quality warnings stretched across the San Joaquin Valley and into the San Francisco Bay Area, where residents were told to keep their windows and doors closed.

California is well on its way to surpassing the last year that had the worst fire season in recent recorded state history. Since the beginning of the year, more than 6,000 fires have destroyed more than 3,260 square kilometers of land – more than three times the losses for the same period in 2020, according to state fire numbers.

California’s raging forest fires were among more than 100 large, active fires that burned in 14 states, mostly in the west, where historic drought conditions have left the land ripe and ripe for ignition.

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Some health experts question whether federal officials have been too quick to move too quickly with relaxing mask recommendations to allow people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to remove face coverings from most indoor and outdoor areas. And they suggest that California and local leaders be a little more careful about loosening mask mandates.

Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus in the Infectious Diseases Department at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, said, “There is good science to support changing our policy. On the other hand, I’m surprised they came up with it so soon. I would have loved to have had another month to see the numbers keep falling. “

If California starts allowing fully vaccinated people to be maskless in stores, then who would check if those without a mask were actually vaccinated? Will supermarkets really be interested in checking vaccination cards at the entrance?

“I can’t see any grocery stores that will confirm you have been vaccinated. It’s just not going to happen, ”said Swartzberg.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents 1.3 million key food and retail workers, also questioned the CDC’s move.

“While we all share a desire to return to normal mask-free conditions, today’s CDC guidelines are confusing and fail to take into account how this will affect key workers who are often exposed to those who are not vaccinated and who refuse to use masks wear, ”said Marc Perrone, the union’s international president said in a statement. “Elementary workers are still forced to play masked police for buyers. … Should they become the vaccination police now?”

However, grocery stores might choose to simply keep a no-mask and no-service policy.

Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the epidemiology and biostatistics division at UC San Francisco, tweeted that the science used in the CDC’s recommendation was solid. “But who bears the brunt of implementing the policy?”

Some of the people who are less likely to be vaccinated in America are workers who were too busy working or looking after families to get the vaccine. “Are we failing important workers again?” She asked.

Some fear the CDC’s move will backfire and normalize if they don’t wear masks – with no vaccinations required. This could result in injury to people who are more likely not to be vaccinated, e.g. B. Lower-income residents and blacks and Latinos, some of whom would like to be vaccinated but could not do so because of factors such as feeling they could, lost work due to side effects of the vaccine or inability to get the vaccine from a trusted location relate – Reasons given in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

Other experts thought the CDC made a good call and believe the new guidelines will entice people to get vaccinated as long as they can see the benefits of vaccination.

“I know a lot of people say on Twitter that the unvaccinated will just say they’ve been vaxed. Some will, but many will not, they will see the vaccination as something more valuable now and look for it, ”tweeted Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner for the US Food and Drug Administration.

On Friday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, admits that more details are needed to ensure how indoor relaxing mask requirements work realistically in certain environments where it is not clear who is being vaccinated and who doesn’t.

“This was a first step in our guide. And what we really need to do now is look at each of our individual guides for each of these individual attitudes, for example in a school, daycare, or workplace environment: is this the right thing? “Walensky said” Good Morning America “on ABC’s.

In practice, Walensky also said it made sense for different states and counties to issue different orders from national guidelines.

“Many of these decisions have to be made at the jurisdiction level,” said Walensky.

Swartzberg has criticized state officials for reopening the economy twice too quickly in the past year, followed by a spike. The question is whether lifting mask mandates too quickly will result in California “being burned a third time”. It’s probably not likely, but it can’t be ruled out, he said.

Swartzberg said he preferred the view of Governor Gavin Newsom, who earlier this week proposed two different ideas for easing mask mandates in California. His second idea, mentioned on Wednesday, was to remove the exterior masks mandates next month, but possibly keep the interior masks mandates a little longer.

“Instead of taking giant steps like I took today from the CDC, we should take small steps toward the same goal,” said Swartzberg. “We’ll get there eventually. But I think we’ll get there safer if we’re more careful. “

Infectious Disease Specialist at UC San Francisco, Dr. Monica Gandhi, was among the experts calling on the CDC to move faster to lift mask guidelines and was surprised at how quickly federal officials acted Thursday. She welcomed the news and said science supported the new recommendations.

She said the mask lifting instructions for fully vaccinated people will be an incentive for those who may have put off the shot.

“People need incentives now,” said Gandhi. “I think this will help people on the fence get vaccinated.”

A complicated problem for local governments is that the CDC seemed to make its announcement without giving any indication of what was to come, and the result is that state and local officials are faced with the difficult task of addressing the difficult problem solve who is responsible for determining who is vaccinated and who may be exposed as a result.

LA District officials were surprised by the details of the CDC announcement, and it took nine hours for the governor’s office to issue a statement on the new guidelines, in a tweet on Thursday evening saying it was reviewing the guidelines and further, “all encouraging eligible Californians can get vaccinated as we plan to fully open again on June 15th. “

“We still have millions of people who haven’t been vaccinated – who haven’t even got a dose,” said Barbara Ferrer, LA county director of public health, Thursday. “And every day the numbers may be small, but every day there are people who get infected.”

As a result, it is advisable to take your time to ensure that rules are in place to keep people’s safety as safe as possible.

One of the questions officials need to answer is what this would mean for employees working on a site who for some reason may not be able to be vaccinated. According to Ferrer, the solution shouldn’t be to create a higher risk of virus spreading between unvaccinated people as LA County tries to keep the number of cases down and keep opening stores and expanding capacity.

The goal is to come up with rules “so that everyone can be pretty comfortable that we don’t have a lot of exposures that would be unnecessary,” Ferrer said. She added that, at least in the near future, “it may not be possible to lift all restrictions everywhere”.

On CNN, Dr. Leana Wen, a former health commissioner for Baltimore, said the CDC’s move made it easier for people who never got vaccinated or wanted to wear masks to go into stores without a face covering – which increases the risk for people who can’t be vaccinated, e.g. . B. Children who are too young to be vaccinated or immunocompromised people who are not fully protected by the vaccine.

“We are putting them at risk now, and I think we are taking ourselves even further from achieving herd immunity,” Wen said.

Here are the basics of CDC mask guidance:

• Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large and small, without wearing a mask or physically distancing themselves.
• Unvaccinated or partially vaccinated individuals are still asked to wear masks in virtually all indoor and outdoor areas when interacting with people outside their household who may not be vaccinated. (Members of a single household with unvaccinated individuals can be maskless indoors if everyone else is vaccinated.)
• Masks are still required for anyone using public transport, including buses and trains, as well as airports and train stations.
• The rules also apply to hospitals, prisons, facilities for the homeless and other institutional facilities.
• Local and state rules can be stricter and stay in place.
• People who have not been vaccinated should continue to wear masks and get vaccinated immediately.

The post Some concern CDC transferring too quick with new COVID masks steering appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

After contract negotiations stalled, hundreds of janitors in San Francisco, represented by Service Employees (SEIU) Local 87, went on March 24.

About 3,000 caretakers in the Bay Area were laid off as the pandemic spread last year. Your union is now calling for all laid-off workers to return to work – but with improvements.

They want better ventilation in buildings, protective equipment for workers, a wage increase, health insurance, additional sick days and protection against sexual harassment for a workforce that is predominantly made up of black migrant women.

At least 26 custodian banks died after being infected with the coronavirus. Workers want improved ventilation.

The three-day strike came to an impasse after eight months of contract negotiations with Able Service and ABM Industries, two contractors that provide cleaning services in downtown office buildings.

The cleaning companies have moved to curtail the union to make seniority concessions and refuse to bargain in good faith, union leaders say.

“In my opinion, they did not come to negotiate. They didn’t want to give anything, but they wanted to take everything, ”said caretaker and negotiating team member Marcos Aranda, 30, father of six.

TECH GIANTS

The janitors clean 600 buildings across San Francisco, including engineering offices on Google, Facebook, and Salesforce.

Strikers picketed across town. Some gathered by the gleaming 1,000-foot Salesforce Tower. This monolith, like many office buildings, was largely empty due to remote work.

The strike coincided with tech workers from Twitter and other California companies returning to offices under state health directives as San Francisco headed for reopening.

While the janitors don’t negotiate directly with tech companies, these powerful companies are the ultimate target as they have the power to move the cleaning companies from intransigence to negotiation.

ESSENTIALLY BUT ignored

While other key workers were celebrated during the pandemic, janitors did not receive the same fanfare.

“There were no parades, no boiling in the cellars of buildings, no hammering pots,” said Olga Miranda, President of SEIU Local 87. “These are the quiet workers who go to work with dignity and nobody but their union makes a fuss makes.”

Caretaker wages of $ 22-23 are not enough to live in San Francisco. Look for an apartment in town to rent and the sticker shock will make you dizzy.

According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for a parent raising a child in San Francisco is $ 56. For two children, it’s $ 68.93.

The strike was over unfair labor practices that revolved around seniority and safety. The cleaning companies are demanding concessions from the union – in particular, the power to use criteria other than seniority to select which workers will be recalled from layoffs.

Seniority determines, for example, who prefers vacation time or who returns to work after being laid off.

“It’s a very slippery slope when you let employers set criteria for who can come back,” said Miranda, running through a series of hypothetical scenarios: “So if companies say good when the person can’t speak English, it’s us.” she doesn’t want to go back. If she’s a woman, we may not want her back. If they are Muslims and have prayed too much because it’s Ramadan, we may not want them back. ”

Overcoming fear

Aranda has been a janitor for 10 years after recovering from low-wage food service jobs. During the pandemic, he continued to work in the janitorial service for Pacific Gas & Electric Company, earning $ 23.30 an hour as a foreman.

He is grateful that he stayed on the payroll even though his building was vacant and other workers struggled to raise money to cover the bills.

Bills are often in Aranda’s head. In preparation for the strike, he took another job at OnTrac, a logistics company on the west coast, where he made $ 17 an hour delivering packages, with an extra dollar as a risk payment.

“There was a lot of fear,” he said, “you know, fear of not knowing what would happen afterwards. Did they want to lock us out? Would I be able to pay my bills? “

In part, he overcame this fear of sitting across from the bosses at the negotiating table, seeing them dig in their heels and rejecting any proposal from the union.

“If we had accepted, I would have felt weak,” he said.

When members argued in the union hall about whether to strike, Miranda said one member was lucky enough to have a job. Another replied, “Who will come to the company from the builder and apologize to your family for not doing enough to look after you? So we can fight while we are six feet above us, or we can mourn six feet below. “

“There are no superheroes. Nobody will fight for your families as much as you will fight for your own, ”adds Miranda. “And that’s why we’re on strike out there.”

KEEP ESCALATING

The union’s membership is diverse – Latino, Black, White, Chinese and Yemeni with an average age of 55 years. They survived the pandemic while the rest of the country huddled at home and worked remotely. Their names filled the number of dead as governors reported weekly on the pandemic rampage.

“There is no normalcy to return to,” admits Miranda, pointing to the move away from floor plans for open offices as an early sign of how the workplace will change.

Additionally, the pandemic may still be with us for some time. President Joe Biden has urged governors across the country to reinstate mandates to wear masks and halt reopening efforts as the country faces another surge in infections.

Despite paying lip service to their victims, key workers barely made any profits during the pandemic. Many refused to disrupt essential services, even if they had the public support to do so. But that’s not the case with SEIU Local 87, a 5,000-member union that tops its weight – and is poised to escalate further from here.

“The biggest fear is not being able to put food on the table or knowing that you will lose the roof over your baby’s head,” said Miranda. “This is scary – scarier than a goddamn pandemic.”

“Strike”
Hundreds of SF caretakers are at STRIKE today.
The caretakers – mainly women, colored people and migrant workers – fight for a fair trade union contract with protection from sexual harassment and security measures!
Boost @Ableserve & @ABM_Industries #JusticeForJanitors pic.twitter.com/KR8bGd0P4A

– Justice for Janitors (@JusticeforJans) March 24, 2021

The post How a Janitors Union in San Francisco Bought Over Its Concern and Struck appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

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