SAN FRANCISCO — CBS News Bay Area will air a special hour Wednesday morning honoring the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein as her body arrives at San Francisco’s City Hall for a day of public viewing.

On Wednesday, the public is invited to pay their respects and sign a condolence book between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. inside the rotunda of City Hall, where Feinstein became San Francisco’s first woman mayor and first woman president of the city’s Board of Supervisors before moving on to become the longest-serving woman senator in U.S. history.

ALSO READ: Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her legacy

Polk Street will close to traffic in front of City Hall from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday while Feinstein lies in state.

At 8 a.m., the morning news on KPIX+ will focus on Sen. Feinstein’s arrival at SF City Hall to lie in state. It will will also be available to livestream on cellphones, tablets and other devices on this page or via the player on the CBSSF.com home page. 

• What: Sen. Dianne Feinstein arrives at San Francisco City Hall to lie in stage for public viewing  

• Date: Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2023

• Time: 8 a.m. to 9 a.m.

• Location: San Francisco City Hall Rotunda

• On TV: KPIX+ 44 Cable 12

• Online stream: Live on the CBSSF.com home page and on your mobile or streaming device.

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The stock of the Pittsburgh Steelers was on a fast track to the moon heading into the 2023 season.

Then, in Week One against the San Francisco 49ers, that stock came crashing back to Earth like a lead balloon.

Things went sideways quickly in a 30-7 loss at Acrisure Stadium on the North Shore in a much-anticipated season opener.

For Good Morning Football co-host and popular NFL Network personality Kyle Brandt, he believes that the Steelers “told the biggest lie” in Week One and that they’ll be just fine and will bounce back.

In his latest 10 Takes with Kyle Brandt podcast, he emphasized that Week One lies to people when it comes to results in the NFL.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again to you: Week One is a liar. It is a pathological liar. Let me make sure you understand: there are teams in Week One that looked like garbage but will have home playoff games this year. There are teams that looked like Super Bowl teams but will miss the playoffs. You can look it up historically; Week One is a liar,” Brandt said on his 10 Takes podcast. “Who told the biggest lie in Week One? …I think it’s the Steelers … I think that the Steelers are going to get off the mat. I just think they ran into the best team in football in the 49ers.”

It’s not at all surprising that Brandt remains in on the Steelers and believes in them despite the lopsided loss in Week One. All summer long Brandt was seemingly driving the Steelers’ hype train, stating early on in the summer that he was picking them to make the playoffs because of Mike Tomlin and Kenny Pickett, well before the hype got out of control in the preseason.

Though the loss was an ugly one for the Steelers with them getting beat up in all three phases, chances are they just were dominated by the best team in football when it’s all said and done. It would not be at all shocking to see the 49ers hoisting the Lombardi Trophy at the end of the year in Las Vegas.

They are that good.

It’s also not surprising that the Steelers have some work to do. While Pittsburgh did a great job reshaping the roster this offseason through free agency, via a trade and in the 2023 NFL Draft, they are still a work in progress and need real reps and adversity to build upon and come together. Though training camp was rather intense and the starters played quite a bit in the preseason, there’s nothing like regular season football.

There’s also nothing like playing the 49ers, too, apparently.

Brandt has faith the Steelers will get off the mat and will be who everyone thought they were going to be, this time in Week Two. We’ll see if Pittsburgh — already pretty banged up — can get off the mat in primetime on Monday Night Football in Week Two.

The post Kyle Brandt: Steelers ‘Instructed Largest Lie’ Of Week 1, Will Be Ready To Get Off The Mat Shifting Ahead appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The concept of single-family zoning was born from lies. Specifically, Bay Area read.

For decades starting in the late 19th century, white residents of San Francisco tried, unsuccessfully, to impose state-sanctioned segregation on their Chinese neighbors. The 1890 Bingham Ordinance, which explicitly banned Chinese residents from certain areas of the city under penalty of jail, was thrown out by the courts on equal protection grounds — as were subsequent efforts at openly racialized zoning.

Undeterred, white property owners searched for legal end-arounds. And they found one in single-family zoning. White elites had almost exclusive access to the kind of capital needed to purchase a freestanding home. And so single-family zoning became a tool for de facto apartheid, under the guise of separation of use. The idea was first implemented in Berkeley in 1916 as a tool to eject Asian-owned laundries and a “negro dance hall” from the proximity of white homeowners. San Francisco soon followed suit.

Like the Bingham Ordinance before it, single-family zoning was initially shot down by courts — for its only slightly more subtle racialized designs. It ultimately survived constitutional scrutiny, however, with the aid of a Supreme Court reversal — by the same justices who upheld “separate but equal.”

And so the practice spread throughout the country — the Bay Area’s gift to American racism.

On Tuesday, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted to finally end single-family zoning in the city that helped birth it. But, with the weight of history on their shoulders, did supervisors rise to the challenge of crafting a bill that earnestly addresses a century of historical wrong?

They didn’t.

Instead, their effort, like single-family zoning itself, was a cheap ploy — a not-so-subtle end-around to subvert a new California law mandating streamlined development in exclusionary neighborhoods. Despite made-for-headlines boasts about allowing fourplexes and six-unit homes on formerly single-family plots, the supervisors’ housing bill will do nothing to spur denser development in excluded neighborhoods.

And they know it.

A planning department feasibility study shows that developers trying to navigate the bill’s restrictions will lose money by the handfuls should they try to build denser housing on a formerly single-family plot.

Cue the chorus of boo-hoos. But guess what happens when developers are guaranteed to lose money? They don’t build anything.

As if to stamp home the fact their bill has no intention of breaking up a century of single-family dominance, supervisors inserted a rule that says only those living in their homes for more than five years, or those who inherited the real estate, can take advantage of new streamlined zoning rules.

What is the point of ending single-family zoning if developers aren’t actually allowed to easily build denser new housing in formerly restricted areas?

“Luxury” condos are notorious boogeymen in San Francisco. But single-family homes are the city’s most luxurious form of housing. Their median sales price is $1.95 million in 2022; that’s $700,000 more than a condo. Single-family homes, with rare concessions, are exempted from rent control — making them largely unaffordable to working families. Homeowners, meanwhile, are granted generous state and federal tax breaks. They also enjoy protections from police search and seizure that many renters do not. Home ownership in America affords a higher status of citizenship. And single-family ownership is at the top of that status.

“This is not the final statement on density in low-density neighborhoods,” Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, the housing bill’s author, said on Tuesday.

Perhaps like that. And the board deserves praise for apparently coming to terms with Mayor London Breed on new social housing spending that could allow government to directly build more affordable units.

But that effort will provide just a fraction of the more than 80,000 new homes San Francisco needs.

As if putting a stamp on the limited scale of their vision, supervisors this week moved forward with another dubious housing measure. This one, draped in sanctimonious language of affordability, would appear on the November ballot—despite feasibility studies that, once again, show nothing will get built under the tight-fisted rules of the plan. With a wink and a nod, the measure’s goal appears to be sabotaging a competing initiative by Breed that would streamline the construction of much-needed dense, mixed-income developments.

These cheap theatrics are ideological parlor tricks in service of a status quo that is failing San Francisco.

Single-family zoning was born of racial malice and a desire to find a legally permissible end-around to integration. That malice is built into the physical structure of our communities.

Read put us here. They won’t get us out.

This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.

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On a recent sunny day in San Francisco, I found myself in a situation most of us who live in California have confronted. Walking down a busy street, I came across an unhoused man lying facedown in the asphalt. Over and over, he screamed for help, one arm plaintively raised to the sky, the other limp at his side. A wheelchair that appeared to be his sat discarded on the sidewalk a few yards away.

A stream of cars and pedestrians passed by without stopping. To be fair, he was no waif. Lifting him into the chair, if that’s what he even wanted, would have been extremely difficult under the best of conditions — and these were not. The man was almost certainly either under the influence or suffering from mental illness.

He needed more help than any one stranger could give him. So I got out my phone and thought about whom to call.

If a recent story in the Atlantic is to be believed, residents of San Francisco, befitting our progressive values, have no shortage of compassionate options to navigate situations like this. We have the “Street Crisis Response Team, EMS-6, Street Overdose Response Team, San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team, Street Medicine and Shelter Health, DPH Mobile Crisis Team, Street Wellness Response Team, and Compassionate Alternative Response Team.”

But are any of these options actually available on demand?

In one of the most heart-wrenching anecdotes in the Atlantic piece, the author describes an added man lying naked outside a Safeway. A woman calls for help. But, tellingly, despite our city’s so-called wealth of services, it is police who respond. And do nothing.

It could have been worse.

When I was living in downtown Los Angeles several years ago, a homeless man, in a state of emotional distress, climbed to the top of a tall billboard near my apartment. Police officers who arrived on the scene tasered him; he fell several stories to his death before a crowd of onlookers.

Just last month, San Francisco police officers showed up to a dispute between two allegedly unhoused men — and shot them both dead.

For all our supposed compassion in California, it is the police who remain the primary point of contact with those suffering in our streets. And they are ill-equipped to handle the task.

All of this was on my mind as I tried to figure out what to do.

If I called 911, would the police come? What if they found drugs on him? Would an arrest record make it even harder for him to get a home one day? Or would the confrontation end with violence if he gave the officers trouble?

In the middle of these deliberations, a voice suddenly jumped up behind me.

“Keep walking,” it said.

I turned and saw a different homeless man staring back at me.

“Keep walking,” he repeated, “or I’m going to f— you up.”

His expression indicated he was serious. And I had no idea what to do.

Was the man standing up for his friend on the ground? Or were the two in conflict? Should I risk a fight to try to figure out how to help?

I could think of no answers — and the man before me was in no mood to talk. So I walked away.

“Do something.”

We hear the phrase repeatedly endlessly here in San Francisco and elsewhere in California in regard to the abject conditions on our streets. But what does it mean?

Any examination has to start with what California voters intended when they passed the endlessly controversial Proposition 47 in 2014. If we take voters at their word, they wanted to do as the bill says — to stop treating crimes of poverty and drug possession as felonies.

Unfortunately, while voting is undoubtedly one of the most assertive forms of mass communication, its message is rarely definitive. There is always a wiggle room for misinterpretation — or willful misreading.

When I recently spoke with conservative state attorney general candidate Eric Early, he argued that Californians didn’t know what they were signing up for with Prop. 47, thanks to the proposition’s misleading ballot title: “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.”

He’s not alone. And he’s certainly right that for a bill designed to ease or eliminate sentencing for low-level crimes, that title is Orwellian.

But in 2020, voters shot down the much clearer “Criminal Sentencing, Parole and DNA Collection Initiative” — which would have rolled back Prop. 47’s reforms — by a 62%-38% margin.

The majority of Californians have repeatedly stated that they do not want crimes born of poverty, mental illness and addiction resolved with jail cells.

But is that the end of it?

“If you’re going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place to do it.”

The cynical implication of that line, pulled from the Atlantic piece, is that San Franciscans have willfully fashioned their city a civil libertarian paradise for the troubled. Misfits from across the country can draw from our city’s alleged font of resources or misbehave as self-destructively they see fit. In our naive compassion, we are happy to let them do as they please.

At least until this week’s recall.

Putting aside the blatant myths that San Francisco is a migration destination for the criminally indigent or a wellspring of social services capable of offering help to all who seek it, is anyone in this city really fine with rampant theft — even out of necessity? Or with people using the sidewalks as toilets? Or with addicts dying on the street with a needle in their arm?

It’s safe to say we are not.

Unstated, but implicit in our voting record, is a broad desire for alternatives to the old status quo of siccing police on poor people, the addicted, the homeless and throwing them behind bars. Voters, in the most direct way we are able, have repeatedly asked for policymakers for new proactive, compassionate solutions.

Instead — and this is true across California — the governmental response in the eight years since Prop. 47 passed has largely been to let chaos reign and argue about its causes. Police rarely respond to low-level crimes or street crises, but neither does anyone else. Meaningful alternatives have been ignored or slow-walked to the point of despair.

This is not what anyone signed up for.

Voters in most major metropolitan areas in California have passed measures allotting billions for supportive homeless housing and treatment services. They have also passed police accountability measures that strongly imply a desire to lessen non-emergency police interactions with the public — which have a history of ineffective, racially fraught and/or violent outcomes.

It’s safe to say that, at a bare minimum, Californians want to be able to call someone — not police — who can contact those on the street, intervene if they are in crisis or causing trouble, institute a mental health hold if necessary and/ or connect them with food, housing, treatment and social services as needed.

This service obviously isn’t the end all be all of crime and homelessness prevention (which, are two separate problems). But it is a prerequisite for meaningfully and compassionately improving our streets and restoring a basic sense of agency over our city’s condition.

Unlike most other cities in California, San Francisco has made inroads into building this infrastructure. Mayor London Breed’s recent budget noted that the city’s Street Crisis Response Team soon intends to field all behavioral 911 calls where no weapon is involved. It currently handles 46%-57% of such calls.

This progress, if it comes to fruition, would be welcome. But the fact that we’re still ramping up capacity while endlessly arguing about our district attorney and police staffing is gutting.

We’re eight years in waiting and voters still don’t have the most basic infrastructure we have repeatedly demanded. In its absence, hopelessness pervades — and a desire by some to return to the old status quo has risen.

Right now, the only sense of agency most San Franciscans feel over their city’s condition is recall. And that’s our biggest failure.

Matthew Fleischer is The Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: matt.fleischer@sfchronicle.com

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