Cruise stopped its driverless operations nationwide last week. But the New York Times reports on the company’s moves since then…

– Cruise hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate its response to a San Francisco incident involving a pedestrian, “including its interactions with regulators, law enforcement and the media.”
– A separate review of the incident is being doncuted by Exponent, a consulting firm that evaluates complex software systems.
– The company’s rivals “fear Cruise’s issues could lead to tougher driverless car rules for all of them.”
– “Cruise employees worry that there is no easy way to fix the company’s problems, said five former and current employees and business partners.”

Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong on a tech industry culture — led by 38-year-old [Chief Executive Kyle] Vogt — that put a priority on the speed of the program over safety. In the competition between Cruise and its top driverless car rival, Waymo, Mr. Vogt wanted to dominate in the same way Uber dominated its smaller ride-hailing competitor, Lyft. “Kyle is a guy who is willing to take risks, and he is willing to move quickly. He is very Silicon Valley,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. “That both explains the success of Cruise and its mistakes.”

When Mr. Vogt spoke to the company about its suspended operations on Monday, he said that he did not know when they could start again and that layoffs could be coming, according to two employees who attended the companywide meeting. He acknowledged that Cruise had lost the public’s trust, the employees said, and outlined a plan to win it back by being more transparent and putting more emphasis on safety. He named Louise Zhang, vice president of safety, as the company’s interim chief safety officer and said she would report directly to him…

With its business frozen, there are concerns that Cruise is becoming too much of a financial burden on G.M. and is hurting the auto giant’s reputation… The shutdown complicates Cruise’s ambition of hitting its goal of $1 billion of revenue in 2025. G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000, according to a person familiar with its operations.

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Ever since crude first gushed from Spindletop Hill in 1901, Houston has been an oil town — the epicentre of America’s oil and gas industry, its fortunes rising and falling with those of the sector.

Today, though, America’s fourth-largest city is rapidly expanding beyond the industry on which it was built. Not only has it become a centre for green energy innovation, but other sectors, including medical technology and aerospace, now call the Texas city home.

“When I grew up in this city, it was oil and gas,” says Sylvester Turner, the city’s mayor. “When I went to law school at Harvard and told people I was from Houston, Texas, many students . . . thought I had an oil well in my backyard.”

Now, Houston’s transformation to an international hub for a growing number of multinational corporations — backed by one of the nation’s busiest international airports and global shipping ports — has helped propel the city to the top of the second annual FT-Nikkei Investing in America rankings.

“We are still an energy-focused town,” notes Turner. “But we are that and so much more.”

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Texas dominated the 2023 rankings, with five cities in the Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan area — Dallas, Plano, Fort Worth, Irving and Arlington — all claiming spots in FT-Nikkei top 20, as did Austin, the state capital.

The Lone Star State is known for its pro-business outlook. Alongside a host of incentive programmes, Texas does not levy a state tax on corporate or personal income. Its cost of living is also significantly lower than other parts of the country.

That has attracted both businesses and people. Since 2000, the population of Texas has grown by more than 9mn, well ahead of any other state. The state’s gross domestic product has roughly tripled over that period to $2.36tn. If it were a country, Texas would boast the eighth-biggest economy in the world — ahead of Italy.

But, while Austin’s reputation as a tech hub and Dallas’s financial services pedigree are well established, Houston has often flown below the radar.

The city prides itself on its lack of frills and a drive to get deals done. Ever since the dredging of the Houston ship channel, in 1914, paved the way for it to go from a forgotten inland town to a vast metropolis and commercial hub, the city has clung to an Old West ethos as a place where hardworking people make their own luck.

“God did not intend a major city to be built in this mosquito-infested, flat, ugly, sort of nothingness world that Houston inhabited,” says Stephen Klineberg, founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research and author of the book Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America. “There’s an ideology in Houston and a belief that ‘we can make this work’.”

That reputation has drawn in businesses both big and small. The Houston area is home to 26 Fortune 500 companies, making it the third-ranking metro area in the country.

“People came here because they saw it as a good location for building business and commercial activity,” says Bob Harvey, president of the Greater Houston Partnership, a chamber of commerce. “That was true in the 19th century and it’s true today.”

Companies such as ExxonMobil — which moved its headquarters to the city this year — ConocoPhillips and Occidental Petroleum helped Houston earn the title of the “energy capital of the world”. However, city leaders want to see it become the “energy transition capital of the world”.

“We did oil and gas the way Detroit did cars, the way Seattle did aeroplanes,” says Klineberg. “That was the identity. Now, it’s in transition and trying to remain a leader in a very different kind of mix of energy systems.”

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Of Houston’s 26 Fortune 500 companies, most are in hydrocarbons. But, as growth in the industry wanes from the shale boom frenzy — with minimal new company formation — and warnings grow over the longevity of fossil fuel demand, the city is adapting.

The transition to green energy is helped by the knowhow that made it a centre for oil and gas. Houston boasts unrivalled technical expertise in energy, including manufacturing, engineering, trading markets, and complex industrial project management. It also has a robust energy infrastructure and the nation’s biggest port by tonnage.

“We’re clear in Houston that if we’re going to continue to have prosperity — to the degree to define prosperity as job growth and wealth creation — it’s going to need to come from places other than the incumbent energy business,” says Bobby Tudor, chief executive of Artemis Energy Partners and a leading corporate voice in the city.

McKinsey, the consultancy, has estimated that the city could grow its share of energy transition capital from about 6 per cent in 2020 to as much as 15 per cent by 2040, reaching $250bn annually.

“Increasingly, people working in the energy transition space are saying, you know, actually where the action is, is here,” says Tudor. “It’s not really San Francisco. It’s not really Boston. It’s Houston, Texas.”

This year alone, Konec, a South Korean maker of electric vehicle parts, announced plans for a new $80mn plant in the city; Sumika, a subsidiary of Japan’s Sumitomo that makes semiconductor materials, unveiled a $250mn plant; and Tinci Materials of China, which makes electrolyte blends for batteries, said it would spend $180mn on a new facility.

Houston has had a more complicated record of attracting investment outside the energy sector, however. In 2018, it failed to make Amazon’s shortlist of 20 cities that the tech group was considering for a second headquarters.

But there have been notable successes in the tech sector. Hewlett Packard Enterprise moved its headquarters from its historic home in Silicon Valley to Houston in 2022.

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The city is also home to the Texas Medical Center, the world’s biggest medical complex, and has positioned itself as a leader in healthcare innovation. The TMC Helix Park opened in late October, a vast new biomedical research hub aimed at turbocharging the commercialisation of research. The project is slated to create more than 20,000 jobs and generate as much as $5.4bn in annual economic impact.

It is an example, says Andy Icken, the city’s chief development officer, of an explosion of innovation centres in the city spanning everything from climate tech to med tech.

Houston is also returning to its 20th-century technological roots. Associated with the US space programme since the Apollo missions of the 1960s, the city once again has a thriving hub of aerospace innovation. Houston Spaceport has positioned the city to be at the forefront of commercial space exploration.

Intuitive Machines, a company that was started in 2013 by ex-Nasa scientists, expects to land the first commercial spacecraft on the moon in January, in what it hopes will be a kick-start for the lunar economy akin to the Spindletop oil rush. Bank of America has estimated that the industry could be worth as much as $1.1tn by the end of the decade.

“The history and heritage from the Apollo programme, and the centring of astronauts for human space flight here, has really given the city a birthright to be Space City,” says Stephen Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive.

“We’re starting to . . . get back to our original identity — and away from being just an energy city,” he adds. “It really is an international city. And it’s where people want to come do business in space.”

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Whether you’re swapping windows or putting up new homes, SF’s red tape is notorious. Those in charge say relief is finally coming.

In SF’s new Permit Center, people with plans, literally, wait for their numbers to be called. (Photo by the author)

“It’s a simple project,” says John McDowell, a permit expediter who helps would-be builders untangle San Francisco’s legendary red tape. His current clients, who own an early 20th-century, mixed-use building on Market Street, want to replace wood windows with more durable materials that he swears will look “exactly the same.”

McDowell says SF’s planning commissioners, who must approve the swap, won’t be able to tell the difference, let alone someone walking by on the street. The windows “are on the second floor, even,” he adds. He wouldn’t disclose the specific address.

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Neither can McDowell say when the project will get on the Planning Commission’s agenda. So far, it’s been an eight-month wait. “They only have meetings once [a week], and you have to get into a queue, and then sometimes they won’t review certain things and sometimes they review other things,” McDowell says.

It’s not an uncommon predicament, even for seasoned expediters. Getting building permits in San Francisco, even for straightforward changes, can be a trial of months or even years, during which time, developers and property owners may end up feeling like the refugees in Casablanca, forced to “wait and wait and wait” with no end in sight.

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Plenty of people with experience developing in San Francisco — be they architects, engineers, developers, permitting experts, and property owners large and small — have a horror story to share, perhaps more than one.

In a March opinion piece in the SF Chronicle, SF YIMBY board member Bilal Mahmood estimated that the median time to get approval to build is 627 days. In 2021 and 2022 the city issued only 2,000 permits a year for new home projects. With a new state mandate to produce more than 10,000 new homes a year this decade, that kind of delay has the potential for disaster.

No secret: The SF Department of Building Inspection’s own presentation on permit reform highlights what’s wrong. You have to admit the melting clock is a nice touch.

Mayor London Breed, some supervisors, and the Planning Commission are pushing for reform — and surprise, so are the very city bodies whose practices are under the microscope. In interviews and recent public meetings, staffers at both the Planning Department and Department of Building Inspection say they’re eager to speed up the way things work.

So what’s taking so long?

Appeal anything

“We love permit processes in San Francisco,” Michael Christensen, one of the city’s principal planners, said at a joint Planning-DBI hearing earlier this month.

He was being sarcastic. Most San Franciscans who’ve had a taste of the permit bureaucracy hate it like bedbugs. Nevertheless it is true that SF is a very permit-happy city, which demands papers for virtually any change to a property, and sometimes dozens of permits for new construction.

Even worse, Christensen pointed out that every single permit in SF can potentially be appealed. Not every appeal prevails, but each one eats up precious time, and the city’s rules grant anyone with a few hundred bucks and a beef the right to file an appeal.

Let’s put new development in SF, broadly speaking, into two buckets. Start with entitlements, during which a developer must convince city planners that their idea is sound.

This is where most of the nastiness happens, including high-stakes meetings, contentious neighborhood outreach, long and indefinite waits like McDowell’s, challenges based on state environmental regulations, and sometimes dirty San Francisco politicking.

San Francisco engineer Daniel Barringer is fed up with what he calls the Planning Department’s “idiotic system”: “They make everything up, they have rules about maximum height and sidewalk setbacks and how wide your garage door can be, but they can change all that based on ‘Does this conform to the style of living unit in the city?’ or whatever. You submit drawings to the city and they sit there for months, could be a year, and then they get back to you with comments they just made up.”

Planning chief of staff Dan Sider admits the process can be bewildering. But his staff is beholden to the process, he says, and can end up as scapegoats when things go sideways.

Over 50 years, additions to the planning code have created “a package of controls so large that we no longer publish a paper version,” Sider writes The Frisc in an email. He notes that in recent years, the permit center has overhauled many processes. “We see roughly 60 people in person at the permit center every day, and fewer than one in five wait more than 25 minutes to speak with a planner,” he adds.

So that’s the front end of the process. But what about those hundreds of days to get various construction permits after city planners approve a project? That’s where the Department of Building Inspection bucket comes in.

Notorious DBI

“Shovel ready” in this city doesn’t mean anyone will pick up a shovel anytime soon. Yet Patrick Hannan, spokesperson for DBI, denies that it really takes the 600 days or more for the department to get builders their permits. In fact, he accuses Mahmood of misreading the data and not correcting his op-ed. What’s more, Hannan says that sometimes city agencies spend days or weeks waiting for applicants to get back to them, during which a project’s timer is running. (The Frisc repeatedly tried to reach Mahmood for clarification but was unsuccessful.)

However, Hannan and everyone else we spoke with at DBI acknowledge the process can indeed take hundreds of days. This is because in some regards, putting up a new structure in San Francisco is a lot like preparing for major surgery.

“You’ve got to talk to your doctor, yes, but there’s also nurses, administrators, specialists,” says permit expediter Dennis Lowery. To an outsider, SF’s permit bureaucracy has parallels to the American health-care system. “If you went to someone in the Amazon and said when you get sick, you’ve got to see 50 people, they’d ask why. And it’s because they all do different things.”

At his presentation earlier this month, SF planner Christensen outlined a cavalcade of departments that can get involved in a major permit — Planning and the DBI, as well as the Fire Department, Department of Public Works, the Public Utilities Commission, the Historical Preservation Commission, and the Bureau of Urban Forestry, to name a few.

‘I’ve never worked in a city quite like San Francisco before. Every project is political. Some people are convinced that things are working just fine the way they are.’ — DBI deputy director for permit services Neville Pereira

According to Hannan, a median housing-related project in SF last year spent 289 days in Planning review; 259 days with DBI; 137 with DPW; 43 with PUC; and for those that needed Fire Department review, another 127. The median length of time was over 620 days, and most projects that were approved in 2022 started in 2020.

Making matters worse, these departments have been bad beyond belief at coordination. As told by those who’ve run through the development gauntlet, permit seekers can feel like riders stuck on a carousel, unable to step off despite feeling queasy.

You get sent to one desk to review paperwork, only to be directed to another. Sometimes these desks will issue confusing or contradictory advice about next steps or timelines. Or someone might catch a discrepancy that should have been caught two desks back, sending you back to where you started.

Roll with it: Dozens of project plans are racked up at SF’s new Permit Center. (Photo by the author)

The new Permit Center, touted by the mayor in March, is supposed to change all that. During a recent visit, staff eagerly highlighted new solutions, such as a single intake desk that checks a permit seeker’s paperwork up front to make sure nothing is missing, rather than discovering an error or omission halfway through.

At this stage, permit seekers now receive an estimate of the duration of the review process. Although it’s a ballpark figure, it still gives both planners and permit seekers a better sense of a project’s timeline.

Also new: Incoming projects are assigned to the next available staff member. Previously it was a strict rotation, which meant a project application assigned to someone on vacation, on leave, or just too busy would collect dust.

These are all great changes, but they’ve been in place for less than a year.

A shocking amount of this work is still done in old-fashioned, analog form. At the Permit Center, you’ll see rolled-up plans piled every which way, like lost scrolls in the Vatican archives. During the pandemic, this analog “system” got so backed up that one permit expediter reportedly threatened to kill himself in protest, in front of the mayor. (The unidentified man ultimately did not harm himself.)

A new digital system has been in the works for years; planners tell us they’re finally getting ready to make the big switch.

A DBI employee displays the key piece of paperwork for most applications — Form 3/8, aka “the pink form.” (Photo by the author)

At DBI, it’s Neville Pereira’s job to cut permit times. The deputy director for permit services has been on the job for two years, part of a wave of hires and appointments meant to clean up the place after an FBI sting exposed corruption at the department’s highest levels. These dirty dealings also further fouled up the permitting process, where those who were favored got to the front of the line faster, while everyone else fell behind.

Even with the old guard gone, the department is still wading through a backlog of potentially crooked work. (The investigation ensnared popular permit expediter Walter Wong, exposing how, though many expediters are honest consultants, the need for them creates the opportunity for exploitation. Notably, of the dozen or so expediters we spoke to for this story, not one was worried that the proposed reforms would put them out of work.)

Pereira says now that we’re fully beyond the pandemic’s restrictions, he’s pushing to cut permitting time for new housing projects in half. Asked how that’s going over politically, Pereira chooses his words carefully: “I’ve never worked in a city quite like San Francisco before.” he says — meaning “a city where every project is political. Some people are convinced that things are working just fine the way they are,” but he declines to name names.

A major goal of reform is getting both of the big process buckets — entitlement and permitting — to happen simultaneously in a “bifurcated system” to chop months off the lead time for up to 97 percent of projects.

Of the dozen or so expediters we spoke to for this story, not one was worried that the proposed reforms would put them out of work.

It is theoretically possible to do this now, but few developers of major projects go for it because of a pair of the complaints we’ve heard. First, the capriciousness of Planning demands — a shorter building, a different unit count, an entirely different layout — could scuttle the construction review already done on the other side of the permit fence. Second, DBI might find a technical flaw that sends a project back to the drawing board, and back to Planning for reapproval. (These cases, which DBI says are rare, nonetheless can add a lot to those hundreds of days of waiting.)

But if Planning, DBI, and other agencies could communicate and work more closely together, that’s the promised land: Politicking and neighborhood appeals could still stymie building (reforming that process is a separate war), but parallel review would slash through acres of red tape, if they can pull it off.

This reporter asked Pereira how long he expects this to take. Five years? More? “Eighteen months,” he replied. The timeline laid out in this month’s joint hearing and presented to The Frisc again at the Permit Center calls for legislation to amend processes sometime this summer, although the specific language is still labeled “in development.”

In this city, it always pays to be skeptical of promises that this time things will be better. But if this is the real deal, then we don’t have long to wait to find out.

Adam Brinklow covers housing, development, and more for The Frisc.

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MORE HOUSING AND DEVELOPMENT COVERAGE IN THE FRISC

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That opportunity for subjective review adds delays and risk for developers, O’Neill said. Her review found that the median time for approving multifamily housing in San Francisco was 34 months between 2018 and 2021 — up from 27 months just a few years before. That process can be dragged out further because San Francisco law allows additional time for appeals.

O’Neill said many of these local laws were written to encourage the proliferation of dense housing. But over the years, they have done the opposite.

“San Francisco actually has comparatively more land zoned for dense housing than a lot of the other jurisdictions in California I’ve studied,” she said. “So the local law is both written in a way to try to say we want to welcome people, we want to have multifamily housing, and yet it’s written in a way to make the process so onerous, so unpredictable, it effectively blocks the development of multifamily housing. And that has huge implications for how inclusive San Francisco truly can be.”

But changing discretionary policies works, the report states. It cites the implementation of a 2017 state law, Senate Bill 35, which required local governments to streamline approval of some projects.

Before SB 35, San Francisco approved just five affordable housing projects over three years from 2014–2017. Since it took effect, 18 were approved between 2018 and 2021, 14 of them directly because of SB 35.

Velasquez said that these numbers, and the lessons gleaned from this report and its outcomes, will help the state speed up housing production in other cities around California.

“A ministerial approval process is essential, to take politics, subjectivity out of the equation, out of the decision-making process. San Francisco needs to do that,” he said. “These lessons that we’re learning .… other jurisdictions will just learn from and try to apply.”

The report notes that to meet its housing goals, set by state law, the city would need to build more than 10,000 housing units a year, more than half of them affordable, each year through 2031. The city’s goals call for more than 82,000 new units to be constructed by 2031.

“Yet they have permitted less than one home per day in 2023,” Velasquez said. “The comparison just is egregious of what they have to approve versus what they’re approving now.”

The post San Francisco Takes Endlessly to Approve New Housing. California Officers Are Forcing Change appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Shaker Heights sorted students by ability level, and the top classes always had more White students. In the pandemic, it unraveled this ‘tracking.’

August 16, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The baseball field outside of Shaker Heights High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a community with a long history promoting racial integration. (Maddie McGarvey for The Washington Post)Comment on this storyComment

This story is adapted from the author’s forthcoming book, “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity.”

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — David Glasner had been superintendent of schools in this Cleveland suburb for less than a year when a single sentence from a fifth-grader left him shaken.

He was visiting Woodbury Elementary School, home to the district’s fifth- and sixth-graders, in fall 2019. Here, the sorting of students by ability — or perceived ability — began. Advanced students, about half the grade, were sent to the basement for enriched math and English language. The other half stayed put.

Glasner popped his head into a fifth-grade classroom and saw that all but one student were Black. A colleague asked a child sitting in the corner, “Where are the White students?” And the student replied, “The White kids — they’re enriched.”

He didn’t say the White kids were getting enrichment. They were enriched. In this formulation, it wasn’t just a question of classrooms, but actual identity.

“That student has internalized that idea that those White kids are better than him,” Glasner said later. “That one incident was a punch to the gut.”

Glasner had already been grappling with how to change a system that seemed to belie the community’s values. The suburb had been founded at the turn of the 20th century as an elite, explicitly racist enclave for wealthy families escaping the city. But beginning in the 1950s, Black and White families came together here to create integrated neighborhoods. They backed busing and drew boundary lines to make schools more integrated, while line drawing in other communities had the opposite intent. Student groups formed to celebrate Black achievement and advance race relations.

But here, as elsewhere, an academic “tracking” system meant White students dominated advanced classes, with regular- and lower-level classes disproportionately occupied by Black students. The disparities resisted various interventions over many years.

At the same time, many families — most of them White — prized the advanced classes and saw them as a pillar of the academic excellence that Shaker Heights also cherished.

Less than a year after that visit to Woodbury, a solution unexpectedly presented itself to Glasner. It was summer 2020, and the district was trying to figure out how to operate in the pandemic — both online and once students returned to buildings. School leaders realized the schedule would be simpler if they eliminated much of the tracking.

It was perhaps the worst time for a change like this. Teaching (and learning) online was already impossibly stressful, and there was no time to train teachers. On the other hand, Glasner and his lieutenants saw a chance to do something difficult that might not present itself again.

Three years later, data suggested some early success. Shaker’s experience would show both the promise of integrating academic tracks, but also its perils — and the high risks that come when major decisions are implemented without community buy-in.

Would Shaker again be a leader in the quest for racial equity, or a cautionary tale?

This trail-blazing suburb has tried for 60 years to tackle race. What if trying isn’t enough?

The rise and fall of tracking

Academic tracking was introduced in the United States in response to the influx of immigrants in the early 1900s — and used to sort students into rigid educational pathways. Certain students were groomed for college and others for trades such as plumbing or secretarial work. By mid-century, most high schools used some form of tracking, though over time it became less rigid.

It consistently resulted in racial disparities. Federal data shows that for 22 percent of White students, calculus is the highest-level math class taken in high school. But the same is true for just 11 percent of Black students and 14 percent of Hispanics. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders top all other races, with nearly half reaching calculus.

In Shaker, as elsewhere, if a student wasn’t in advanced English in seventh and eighth grade, the chance of joining those classes in high school was slim. In math, it was all but impossible. If you didn’t have enriched math in fifth and sixth grade, you probably wouldn’t take pre-algebra in seventh grade, then couldn’t enroll in Algebra 1 in eighth grade and so on.

As such, decisions about math placement made when students were still in elementary school determined whether they could reach calculus by their senior year of high school, a sign of academic rigor that college admissions officers value.

The problem was twofold: Black students were not encouraged to take upper-level classes, despite an open-enrollment program aimed at making sure they had equal access. Meanwhile, White parents actively pushed to get their children into these courses.

“Every White person wanted their kid in advanced, and open enrollment allowed it,” said Glasner, who is White.

“Every White person wanted their kid in advanced, and open enrollment allowed it.”

— David Glasner, superintendent of Shaker Heights schools

In recent years, school districts made racial equity a priority, with new urgency after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Tracked classes, the site of so much inequity, were an obvious target. California considered a new math curriculum that eliminated tracking for most students. School systems in New York City, Boston, San Francisco and Alexandria, Va., changed admission policies in hopes of boosting Black and Hispanic enrollment in elite magnet schools. And districts including Shaker Heights began combining students into mixed-ability classrooms.

In early 2019, after five years as a middle school principal, Glasner, then 40, was named superintendent of the Shaker Heights City School District. Research for his doctoral thesis had bolstered his concerns about tracking, finding students with average ability levels did better when placed in higher-level classes, especially Black students.

When he got the job, Glasner suggested he would promote “incremental change,” perhaps starting with the youngest students. “One thing I’ve learned is it’s really important to bring people along with this change,” he said at the time.

But when the pandemic hit and a decision was needed about the fall schedule, Glasner set aside his concerns about community buy-in. Part of his reasoning was that if tracking remained in place, segregation would worsen. There was a public health imperative to keep students isolated in small groups, so if two students were together for honors math, they would be together for everything else, too. With the support of his principals, Glasner made a major change.

Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses would still be stand-alone offerings in the upper grades of high school, but most classes between fifth and ninth grades would collapse. Honors- and regular-level students would all be taught together at the honors level.

Glasner said a decision on whether to make the change permanent would come later. In his mind, though, he suspected — and hoped — that they were never going back.

In retrospect, even many supporters of detracking said it was a mistake to move this quickly in a pandemic — leaving no time for training teachers, preparing parents or explaining the changes in any real detail.

The district did little to recruit allies who might have helped sell the change. Glasner did not give the Parent Teacher Organization a heads-up or ask for aid explaining or advocating for it. There was no Q&A document posted on the district website, and there was a lot of misunderstanding about the new policy. For instance, many wrongly concluded that AP and IB classes at the high school were disappearing or changing, which they were not.

The district pressed the philosophical case for detracking with scant details about how it would be accomplished.

“People were like, ‘We get the why. We want to understand the how,’” said Sarah Divakarla, a White woman who was PTO co-president.

The combination of online learning and detracking delivered a double serving of anxiety. Stacey Hren, the other PTO co-president, who is also White, heard families complain that classes were too slow and no longer assigned homework. She personally knew of five families who left the district with generic explanations like, “This is just a better fit for us,” which Hren read as “coded White privilege language.”

When asked about families who left, Glasner flipped the question around. What about all the families the old system was failing? He said he was on a call with parents in spring 2021 during which a White parent voiced frustration that her child wasn’t being challenged. But on the same call, he said, a Black parent said, “It’s about time we made a change.”

Still, even some district leaders were dismayed by the early going. Lawrence Burnley, a Black man who joined the Shaker school district in 2022 as chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer, said the intention was well meaning but the implementation was a mess. “There were parents who value a detracked system but they need it to be done well,” he said. “It was a disaster.”

Criticism came from Black and White families.

“I don’t think it’s fair to have the honors kids in with the, we’ll call them regular kids,” said Adriann Kennedy, a Black woman who graduated from Shaker schools, sent three children through Shaker and now was a primary caregiver for a grandson in elementary school. “The honors kids will be bored or the regular kids left behind.”

Andrew Farkas, who is White, was a high school sophomore in the 2020-2021 school year. He had been on the enriched and advanced track since third grade. Now, in 10th grade, his detracked class was still labeled honors but felt very different.

“There were kids who were just learning at such a different speed than I learned,” he said. In ninth grade, he said, students would be assigned to read 30 pages per night, and his essays would be returned marked up with red pen, and he could see where he’d made mistakes. Now the teacher had students reading the texts aloud during class, and his homework took maybe 10 minutes. “You just get a score. Oh, 95, great, cool, I guess.” He added: “They’re bringing down expectations instead of bringing up expectations.”

John Morris, one of Andrew’s teachers who is also president of the teachers union, knew Andrew’s concerns were shared by some teachers. When teaching at a high level to “students who are motivated and gifted, you can take students places that are extraordinary,” said Morris, who is White. “You can almost step back as a teacher and watch amazing things happen. I’ve seen it.” Now those teachers felt “a loss.”

William Scanlon, a White high school science teacher, thought detracking had great potential but in practice found it impossible. The idea that these classes would be taught at a true honors level was “a joke,” he said.

In ninth-grade honors physical science classes, he said, he used to do complicated problems that required advanced math skills and talk about “the quantum theory of the models of the atoms.”

“There is no chance I could teach that this year,” he said.

The early going was smoother for Erin Mauch, a White English teacher, who worked to create assignments that could be completed in multiple ways. For a unit on graphic novels, for instance, students could choose the more challenging task of creating their own graphic novel, including identifying the elements that make up the format, or they could analyze an existing panel. Both assignments required understanding graphic novels, but one was more ambitious.

As the year came to an end, she noticed that more of her sophomores were opting to take the advanced course offered in 11th grade than was normally the case. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” she said.

John Morris saw the demographic impact immediately. When classes were leveled, his honors English class had 24 students, two of them Black. After the change, 11 of his 21 students in the same honors English class were Black. And he had long offered his multidisciplinary American Experience course with honors and regular students mixed together.

In his American Experience class on a Monday afternoon in spring 2022, racially diverse groups of sophomores spread across the high school library, researching figures and topics from various decades. At one table, the 1960s group was puzzling over Beatlemania, while over at the ’90s table, they were considering Bill Clinton and the advent of email. “Who is Bob Dole?” someone asked. No one seemed to know, but they were looking him up. Every group was engaged in conversation, laughing and having fun together. It was a class that looked like Shaker.

“It’s just super fun,” said Grace Sheets, a White girl. They weren’t friends before the class, she said. “Now we are.”

The one group of teachers who got formal coaching on detracking (albeit after the new system began) were middle school math teachers, who arguably faced the toughest challenge because students were enrolled in classes even if they had not successfully completed the precursor courses. Plus many were learning online.

Their mandate was to collapse a year and a half of math into one year to prepare all students for the advanced track in high school. To help, the district hired a consulting firm, West Wind Education Policy. Teachers said sessions dealt more with the underlying philosophy and moral urgency of detracking and less with the nuts and bolts of teaching a diverse classroom. One math teacher rolled her eyes when asked if West Wind had been helpful.

Asked whether teachers were readied for this moment, Glasner ducked the question. “I’m not sure there’s any amount of preparation that would make every teacher feel prepared,” he said.

Teachers were trying their best to manage deleveled classes with the tools they had.

One morning in spring 2022, almost two years into the detracking initiative, seventh-grade math teacher Karlee Robinson, a young White woman with a deep reserve of energy, greeted her students with the enthusiasm of a coach on the eve of a big game. “You ready to rock-and-roll? You got everything you need?” she asked as students filed into Room 321 of Shaker Heights Middle School.

She asked students to close their eyes and give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down as to whether they understood the lesson from yesterday. It was a way of checking in without embarrassing anyone, and most of the thumbs pointed up. For the next fifty minutes, she walked a line, pushing certain students to deepen their knowledge while helping others keep up.

Their first task was to list on a piece of paper every topic they could remember learning from the year. One White girl quickly ran out of space: probability, exponents, integers, order of operations, volume, decimals, and on and on. A Black boy sitting next to her stared out the window, having written nothing on his page. “You didn’t write anything?” the girl said to him, glancing at his page. “Wow.” And that prompted him to start writing.

Robinson divided the class into stations, each of which offered a different type of review. At one, students could pick among three worksheets. They were all mazes that required solving a problem to move to the next step, but they could choose worksheets with one-step, two-step or multi-step problems.

“At the beginning of the year, remember how we talked about a growth mind-set? We challenge our brains,” Robinson told the group seated around a circular table in the corner. Most kids took the hardest worksheet, the multi-step version. One girl took the two-step option and slowly but steadily worked her way through it. Another student, clearly less engaged, kept tipping back his chair and staring at nothing in particular. He took the one-step sheet and worked on it a bit, with the teacher offering help in exactly the same tone as she used for every other student in the group.

It was an example of the type of high-ceiling, low-floor exercises that are critical to mixing kids in a class. The boy doing the one-step problems seemed miles away from what anyone would consider honors math work. But that didn’t stop others in his group from challenging themselves. Maybe he picked up something from being around more engaged students that he wouldn’t have otherwise. And this small group had something that traditional honors courses have not had. It looked a lot like Shaker: two White girls, one White boy, three Black boys and one Black girl.

In an eighth-grade classroom, most of the White students in the room were seventh-graders accelerated into eighth-grade math — an accommodation offered for some advanced students.

Tasked with filling out a worksheet matching various formulas to graphs, one Black eighth-grader was struggling. The girl next to her, a White seventh-grader named Ellie, stepped in to gently explain it.

“Which one is positive?” Ellie said, pointing to the options. “What one is negative? … Yeah, there you go. Perfect. … It’s positive and there’s only one positive left. … Yeah, that’s right.” The older girl said that she understood it better after the one-on-one help.

Ellie said coaching someone else helped her understand the material better herself: “When explaining it, it gets that imprint in your head.”

By summer 2023, district officials saw evidence that detracking was producing positive academic results.

District data showed that the number of students of all races taking AP classes in high school rising. The number of Black students taking at least one AP course nearly doubled from 53 in 2018-2019 to 98 in 2022-2023. John Moore, director of curriculum, said it was too soon to say whether that change related to detracking, but he did credit a renewed push at the high school to encourage more Black students to try these classes.

Fears that the changes would drive some families away appeared to be mostly unfounded. In the past two years, after an enrollment drop closely related to the pandemic, the number of students declined but only slightly and in line with long-term demographic trends.

Most compelling, Moore said, were changes in math scores of eighth-graders in classes like the one Ellie took.

Before the change, very few Black students took Algebra 1 in eighth grade; afterward, almost everyone did. In spring 2021, after the first year of detracking, 44 percent of Black students demonstrated competency in algebra in end-of-year testing, a requirement for high school graduation. Two years later, in spring 2023, that rose to 51 percent.

It was still only half the students. Yet under the old system, most of them would never have even been in the class or taken the test in eighth grade.

“This is truly, truly remarkable,” Moore told the school board in July. “While we certainly have room to grow and we are committed to that, I really think this is a celebratory moment.”

Still, the district has a long way to go, with more teacher training needed to help make this new system work, said Burnley, the DEI director. He is encouraged by early progress, and finds “some reason for optimism” today. But he was cautious about declaring victory: “There’s a lot of work yet to be done.”

Story editing by Adam B. Kushner. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Copy editing by Mike Cirelli. Design by Jennifer C. Reed.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is once again venturing into the country’s culture wars, enacting legislation that GOP lawmakers say would protect gas stoves from overzealous state regulators.

A bill passed on Tuesday would ban the use of federal funds to regulate gas ranges as a hazardous product, while a separate bill due for a vote on Wednesday would block an Energy Department rule setting stricter energy efficiency standards for cooktops and ovens.

Both bills were due for passage last week, but implementation was delayed after House Conservatives staged a mini-revolt in retaliation for Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leadership on a measure to raise the debt ceiling. Led by outspoken members of the House Freedom Caucus, 11 Republicans broke with their party in an otherwise routine procedural vote that rattled the House schedule for a full week.

McCarthy appeared to settle the dispute late Monday after promising more meetings with GOP holdouts and seeking to cut future federal spending.

With the impasse resolved, Republican lawmakers refocused on gas stoves and bureaucratic rules that Republicans call classic government transgression.

“For the hard-working Americans who will be affected, this is no small concern,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. “The last thing they need is for the Biden administration’s Green New Deal regulatory assault to reach their kitchen appliances.”

The bill to classify gas stoves as dangerous was passed by a vote of 248-180.

The White House said President Joe Biden opposed both GOP bills because they blocked “common sense efforts to help Americans reduce their energy bills.” Neither bill is expected to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Dozens of Democrat-controlled cities, including San Francisco and Berkeley, California, have voted to ban the use of gas stoves in new buildings in a bid to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve indoor air quality. New York State passed legislation last month banning natural gas stoves and ovens in most new buildings.

Fears of a national ban grew after a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission said in January that “every option is on the table” when it comes to regulating gas stoves, which are associated with poor indoor air quality and health concerns such as asthma to be connected. The remark sparked images across the internet of the government lugging four-burner cooktops out of homes, while social media users and GOP lawmakers vowed to defend the popular appliances.

The debate flared up again after the Department of Energy proposed a rule that would require the use of more efficient designs and technologies for both gas and electric ranges and cooktops.

According to an analysis by the Department of Energy, the Department of Energy rule, which is yet to be finalized, could ban about half of the gas stove models currently sold in the United States by 2027. The rule would only apply to new appliance sales and would not affect cookers already in homes or businesses.

House Energy and Trade Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Washington, called the US Department of Energy’s plan “just the latest in a long line of power grabs by the far left and the Biden administration.”

The rule is “not about public safety. It’s about telling the American people that the federal government knows best and will decide what kind of car they can drive, how they can heat their home, and how they can now cook food for their families,” said McMorris Rodgers.

Forcing Americans to switch to more expensive alternatives to natural gas would increase costs while disproportionately harming the poor and low-income families, she said.

Democrats called these concerns exaggerated.

“This is nothing more than a conspiracy theory invented to embroil Congress in culture wars that shed more excitement than light on the issues facing our nation,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pennsylvania.

“Contrary to the heated rhetoric of our colleagues on the other side, the federal government has not proposed removing devices from American homes,” Scanlon said. The Department of Energy’s proposed rule would save consumers up to $1.7 billion and reduce emissions harmful to children’s health, she added.

The bill, which blocks regulation of unsafe gas stoves, jeopardizes the government’s ability to identify and regulate appliances with design flaws that could lead to injury or death, Scanlon said, noting that the consumer safety panel recently recalled gas stove models consumers are at risk of carbon monoxide poisoning.

An Energy Department spokeswoman said the proposed rule was “intended to do nothing more than increase energy efficiency and encourage innovation without sacrificing the reliability and performance that Americans have come to expect.”

The White House said the government has “made it clear that it does not support any attempt to ban the use of gas stoves.”

Getting rid of the energy efficiency rule would “deprive the American people of the savings they have with more efficient new appliances on the market if they choose to replace an existing appliance,” the White House said in a statement while it supported the other bill agreed. would undermine the science-based decision making of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”

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As the summer season approaches, guests traveling to the mid-coast will have two new restaurants available to indulge their inner Francophile, each showcasing a different style of cuisine from the European country.

La Cave in Camden opened in May and focuses on French bistro fare like snail and duck fat fries with garlic aioli. Alsace in Union will open this summer and will have a stronger meat and potato approach from the North East region of France.

Both are new to the Mid Coast.

Jennifer Roux, co-owner of the new Alsace, said the restaurant’s menu will reflect Alsace’s unique cuisine, which has strong German influences. Dishes may include sauerkraut, red cabbage, potatoes, sausages, spaetzle, and more.

“I think people think of French food as very fancy, difficult to understand and inaccessible. It’s going to be very inviting,” said Roux.

Alsace will also serve tarte flambee, a regional specialty consisting of very thinly rolled bread dough covered with crème fraîche, thinly sliced ​​onions and bacon, Roux said. The restaurant has experimented with several possible toppings, including Maine blueberries and one with leeks, mushrooms, onions, and bacon. Traditionally, the dish was also used to test how quickly the dough crisped up and how the wood-fired oven heated up.

“They ate this tarte flambee as a treat with whatever they got from the garden,” Roux said. “It’s a really nice tradition from rural Alsace.”

At La Cave in Camden, bistro cuisine represents a different style of French cuisine. The menu features dishes like salmon tartare with avocado and citrus on crunchy green plantain chips, and a rocket salad with goat cheese, Morse’s beet relish, roasted pine nuts and avocado, and snails dressed with garlic, butter and parsley.

“I spoke to every customer and everyone said the food was amazing. And we’re now known around town for probably the best mussels in Camden, which is incredible,” said Ben Toussaint, who owns the restaurant with Will Statz and Devon Morris.

La Cave mussels are served with a creamy white wine sauce, aromatic herbs and spices.

Also of note is the French onion soup — the restaurant calls it Wood Fired Onion Soup Au Gratin. The beef broth cooks in their wood-fired oven for 48 hours, developing so much flavor, Toussaint said. The soup is topped with traditional Gruyere cheese.

“The flavors are just original and really, really bold and incredible,” said Toussaint.

The bistro serves what Toissaint calls “French portions,” which are smaller than typical American portions. The dishes are meant for sharing.

Alsace cuisine is overseen by Jennifer Roux’s husband, Fabrice Roux, a French Champagne chef who trained in Paris before working in Las Vegas and San Francisco. Together they owned three restaurants in California before moving to Maine. This will be their first restaurant in Maine.

Jennifer Roux said she sees similarities between Maine and the Alsace region, both located in the northeast of their respective countries.

“We like the food that isn’t fancy, even though he comes from a very ritzy professional background,” said Jennifer Roux. “The food we like is often classified as farm food, like the food your grandmother makes for you.”

Alsace will open sometime this summer once a staff is in place. The restaurant is currently hiring kitchen staff. They hope to offer an al fresco lunch service with daily specials in the meantime.

La Cave is open seven days a week and often features live jazz music, which the restaurant hopes to continue into the summer season. On Wednesdays they serve a limited menu – until the staff is fully trained. The other six days there is a full menu from 5pm to 10pm and a smaller bar menu from 10pm to 12:30pm.

Chef Elizabeth Toussaint, Ben Toussaint’s ex-wife, is at the helm of the kitchen.

“She attended one of the best cooking schools in Colombia, where she’s from, and has since worked at several restaurants in Colombia and New Jersey, including a few years at Primo in Rockland,” said Ben Toussaint.

More articles from the BDN

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Mario, voiced by Chris Pratt, left, and Luigi, voiced by Charlie Day in Nintendo’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

By Jake Coyle | Associated Press

April is the cruellest month, growing lilacs from the dead land, mingling memory and desire, stirring up dull roots with spring rains. But it’s also, when I look at the clock, Mario Time.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie with its primaries is here to brighten up our dreary springs, TS Eliot be damned. That there’s a surge in excitement about a Mario Bros. movie is a once unthinkable development. The last time Mario made it to the big screen was in 1993 in the little-known live-action film starring Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi, and Dennis Hopper (!) as Bowser. Hoskins called the experience “af——— nightmare.”

But a lot has changed in the three decades since Super Mario Bros, the first-ever video game adaptation. A once widely derided genre is now a cash cow. The Last of Us is a smash hit on HBO. Pokemon and Uncharted are box office hits. Since Sonic the Hedgehog already has two movies in it, Mario is playing catch-up.

And The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which opens in theaters Wednesday, is a spirited and lively attempt to race to the front of the pack. A collaboration between legendary video game designer and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Illumination founder Chris Meledandri (both producers) is a drastically more candid effort to capture the fun and spirit of Nintendo gaming.

And visually a dream. Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and their animators have rendered the Mario universe with cartoonish glory, combining the game’s brilliant simplicity with a more robust and equally delightful tag-glo flavor. If playing Super Mario Bros. is part of the appeal. and its many offshoots have always consisted of immersing themselves in such a sunny imaginary world – plus composer Koji Kondo’s bouncy, catchy compositions – the film has successfully mirrored that mushroom-pounding delight. It makes you want to…play Mario.

Because as nice as it is to watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it’s not nearly as fun as it would be to play it. It’s him, Mario, but it’s not an A-masterpiece. The storyline is just a touch above the interludes of storyline you usually get between games. With the exception of Jack Black’s exceedingly lovesick Bowser (he’s part Phantom of the Opera, part Meatloaf-style ballad), there’s nothing here to deepen these characters beyond their usual 2-D adventures. Mario may be a modern day Mickey Mouse, but his kingdom resides on the console.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie begins much like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing: in a Brooklyn pizza joint. There, Mario (Chris Pratt, passable despite the outcry) and Luigi (Charlie Day) struggle to get their plumbing business up and running. There are a few moments of stereotypical Italian life – pasta and a big family dinner – before the brothers try to fix a burst water main, dropping them through a portal and into the game’s fantasy realm. (In future Brooklyn set sequels, Mario will likely fight off waves of walkers and hipsters.)

On the other hand, Bowser reigns over a Koopa army of troops in scenes that can feel like the most surreal Triumph of the Will impersonation yet. But while zooming in or out is possible on that other side of the green tube, there’s never any mention of the possibility of lives being lost as Mario weaves his way through mushroom patches and question mark boxes. His predicament is as clear as it is in the game: he has been separated from Luigi and he must help save Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) from being forced to marry Bowser.

Game logic often dictates Mario’s movements. The shells of the turtle-like Koopas can be pushed around like ammunition. And choosing a Mario Kart vehicle is an equally difficult decision. Sometimes the overlap is less consistent. An Invincibility Star is the most coveted item in this adventure, greatly exaggerating its typical usefulness. These things take about 10 seconds.

None of this is likely to be enough to make anyone exclaim, “Oh, yes!” as they hop up and down and take off their hats. But it’s an hour and a half of superlative marketing that will whet your appetite for more Mario at home on the couch. If anything, the – as Mario would say – “okey dokey” Super Mario Bros. Movie only reinforces the distance between two vastly different media. It may be Game-On for video game adaptations, but the Mario main event is still back on Nintendo.

“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”

2 1/2 stars out of 4

Evaluation: PG (for action and light violence)

Duration: 92 minutes

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There was always a little mischief to be heard in “Le Pupille” as writer/director Alice Rohrwacher began assembling a group of young girls to fill a Catholic boarding school for a story set in her native Italy in the middle of World War II, but one thing no one would mess with was the original letter that inspired the film, a Christmas correspondence from acclaimed author Elsa Morante with literary critic Goffredo Fofi about a coveted cake that would require creativity on the part of the director, a part Morante would surely appreciate .

“For me, [Morante’s] a goddess,” Rohrwacher said after a recent screening of the short film at AFI Fest in Los Angeles. “So I respect her words and I thought the best way to respect words is to make a song because when you make a song you never change the words.”

It was just a challenge Rohrwacher would take on after issuing one from Alfonso Cuaron, who had set out to reach directors for a series of films over the holiday season for Disney. There were no mandates other than a connection to Christmas, but when the pitch immediately conjured up images of the pink confection that was at the heart of Morante’s letter in Rohrwacher’s head, a story set in 1943 began to open up, and the author/ Director hoped to work within the constraints of the time, make all visual effects as viable as in the era and build the story around the letter, which she set to music with the help of her friend Norina Liccardo and the children in her cast of The Finnish Experimental -Trio Cleaning Women.

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Welcome to The Check-In, our weekend travel feature.

It’s now easier for The Last of Us fans to view Alberta filming locations

There’s a way to follow in the footsteps of Joel and Ellie without worrying about the infected, FEDRA, or Hunters chasing you.

The HBO hit The Last of Us, based on the popular video game, was filmed entirely in Alberta, Canada between July 2021 and June 2022. According to Travel Alberta, this was the largest film production in the province’s history — and one of the largest in Canada — with scenes shot everywhere from downtown Calgary to Edmonton’s Legislature Building to Fort Macleod.

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Travel Alberta has compiled an interactive map showing the various filming locations and will be updating it with new locations as the episodes air. There is also an accompanying episode guide that delves deeper into the neighborhoods, buildings, and businesses featured in the show. This makes it easy for The Last of Us fans to embark on a self-guided tour, and while you’re sadly unlikely to encounter Pedro Pascal during your adventure, you can at least see what these locations look like without the post-apocalyptic sheen.

United Airlines flight crashes just 800 feet over the Pacific Ocean

The news this week, “Maybe we should rethink this whole flying thing,” reported that in December a United Airlines plane en route from Maui to San Francisco suddenly crashed 800 feet over the Pacific Ocean.

The incident happened on December 18, just after United Flight 1722, a Boeing 777-200, reached 2,200 feet. The Air Current reports that the plane “began a steep dive that … reached a rate of descent of nearly 8,600 feet per minute.” The aircraft was below 775 feet when it recovered. The flight was uneventful and upon landing the two pilots – who together have flown around 25,000 hours – submitted a safety report. United told NBC News that an investigation was conducted that “ultimately resulted in the pilots receiving additional training. Safety remains our top priority.”

What makes a sustainable hotel?

At 1 Hotel San Francisco, a lemon is not just a lemon.

It’s an ingredient in several dishes at on-site restaurant Terrene, a side dish, a bowl, and even part of the salt that goes around the rim of the ZW (Zero Waste) cocktail. With sustainability driving the hotel’s mission, a team tasked with finding ways to process an ingredient “from A to Z” learned a lemon can do it — after being juiced, they’re roasted in a wood-fired oven , which makes them produce more juice. From there, that lemon zest “is basically turned into a charred ash, but it’s a lemon ash and we can capture that and mix it with a little bit of salt and it becomes a garnish,” Joel Costa, director of sales and marketing at 1 Hotel San Francisco said The Week. “No part of it is ever left.”

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Before opening in June 2022, the 1 Hotel San Francisco was extensively and sustainably renovated. To reduce waste and minimize carbon emissions, locally sourced and reused materials have been used for everything from floors to elevator walls, and the interior has been gutted, with new energy-efficient lighting and plumbing systems installed. Five-minute timers are in each shower to remind people of the drought and the importance of conserving water, and there are no single-use plastic cups, bottles, or straws on the property. “Every decision we make is very well thought out – it’s a 360-degree thought process,” Costa said.

The same research went into key room details, like the sheets, and Costa said there’s a learning curve. “When we were originally looking for organic cotton sheets, we were made aware by various suppliers that organic cotton is actually more harmful to the planet than regular cotton due to the water consumption,” he explained. “Now we’re sourcing our bedding from sustainable sources, which makes more sense for the planet because we’re not encouraging organic’s growing process, which ultimately takes up more land, water and other resources. That was an interesting topic for me to get my head around.”

The fun part of sustainability is thinking big and finding ways to enhance the guest experience while being eco-friendly. There have been hits — like renting bikes made from recycled Nespresso capsules — and failures, as 1 Hotel San Francisco learned when it first introduced a charcoal product to travelers who forgot toothpaste. “It didn’t go down well because it’s black when you brush your teeth,” Costa said. “Of course it flushes out, but it kind of put people off. We then switched to offering small chewable tablets that are not wasteful.”

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This aligns with 1 Hotel San Francisco’s goal of minimizing waste, particularly in the kitchen. “We tried to incorporate as much hyperlocality as possible from the start once we had a chef on board,” Costa said. “Before we opened, we started visiting local farmers and forging relationships so we could source unique ingredients for our menus, coming from under 50 miles or 100 miles at most. … We’re lucky. In Northern California this is possible.”

When there’s not much travel time, produce stays fresh and doesn’t spoil before it makes it to the dining room — and when a few sprigs of herbs or micro-veggies are needed, a cooking garden continues to grow on the hotel’s rooftop alongside beehives that produce honey for drinks and produce desserts. Costa said that as of December, the kitchen diverted about 71 percent of its waste from landfills through composting and recycling, and “we’re very proud of that.” Seventy-one percent and only six months old is a really good number.”

Catherine Garcia was a guest at the 1 Hotel San Francisco.

Plan accordingly: Upcoming events to add to your calendar

The New York International Children’s Film Festival, in its 26th year March 3-19, will present a long lineage of thoughtful and intelligent live-action and animated films. The aim of the festival is to help young people to better understand themselves and their surroundings through films, while presenting different storytellers. The films will be shown in theaters throughout New York City, and attendees can also participate in events such as Q&As with filmmakers. For 2023, new films from France, Mexico and Japan will be shown, as well as the international premiere of Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Giberritia.

For more travel news and features, sign up for The Week UK’s travel newsletter, delivered to your inbox bi-weekly.

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