Supervisors Propose Universal Child Care Ballot Measure

by Nathan Falstreau: hoodline – excerpt

n June 2018, San Franciscans may get to weigh in on a ballot initiative that would enact universal childcare for city residents.

At yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim joined District 7 Supervisor Norman Yee to advance the initiative. The two instructed the Controller’s office to analyze the proposal’s costs and benefits.

“Nationwide, 60 percent of households with children do not have a stay-at-home parent,” Kim said, noting that center-based childcare for an infant in many states costs more than tuition and fees at public universities. “With these stark realities, we know that we must do better.”

At the meeting, Kim said she plans to introduce an initiative that would fund and implement a program to ensure access to affordable child care, possibly modeled after a sales tax ballot measure Alameda County is floating…

Details about the proposed ballot initiative—and how much it would cost to fund the program—have not been solidified, nor was a revenue stream identified.

A representative from Yee’s office told Hoodline v email that “the details of the ballot initiative will be contingent on the findings of the Controller report that Supervisors Kim and Yee requested.”

“If we truly believe that families are the backbone of our city,” Kim explained, “and that we have to do all that we can to hold onto them and make this city a family-friendly city, we have to do better and we can.”… (more)

 

Supervisor Kim to call for hearing on Super Bowl committee’s Muni wire removal

By Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez : sfexaminer – excerpt

Some San Franciscans are decidedly not happy over the Super Bowl 50 Host Committee’s proposal to remove Muni wires near Market Street, for its “Super Bowl City.”

After the San Francisco Examiner first broke the story on Thursday, more than 100 angry citizens flooded the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency with emails concerning the proposal.

The story even garnered national attention, with follow-up coverage in Gawker-media,Breitbart, and sports blog SB Nation.

“Public transit in San Francisco is a plodding, inconvenient mess on its very best day, and now the NFL wants the city to tear a portion of it down. No thank you,” wrote SB Nation.

Supervisor Jane Kim heard from those incensed citizens too, and told the San Francisco Examiner she will call for a hearing on the plans to remove Muni wires, at the Board of Supervisors’ regular meeting Tuesday.

“I don’t have a lot of info about the Super Bowl’s proposal,” Kim said. Sources told the Examiner that most of the discussion was between the Super Bowl 50 Host Committee and The Mayor’s Office. Kim said the committee didn’t initially talk to her, even though the Super Bowl fan village is located in her district.

“No one’s come to my office about it,” she said, but the committee spoke to her following the initial news coverage.

The hearing will be an opportunity for Kim to get answers, she said, but also “It will give people an opportunity for input.”

Supervisor Malia Cohen also has a hearing on the Super Bowl scheduled, for Dec. 7, but it’s more general and not specific to transit.

The SFMTA Citizen Advisory Council will also hear the topic of the Muni wires Dec. 3., but has no power to stop the project.

Still, more than 100 citizens wrote the council asking them to intervene.

“Tell the Super Bowl Committee to live with some wires. This is supposed to be a green, progressive city. Public transportation is a huge part of that… besides, it already takes me over an hour to get home on the train,” wrote Erin Kerrigan.

“What would Herb Caen say? He’d be appalled,” wrote Darius Aidala, in an email to the committee.

“Please don’t let big business cost us further money and make life difficult for those who live here,” wrote Angela McAllister.

“If SF Muni or Mayor Ed Lee or any supervisor contemplates sanctioning this request they should be run out of town covered in tar and feathers,” wrote Raymond Vitale, of San Francisco.

Erik Ogan, a San Francisco resident and software engineer at Change.org, started an online petition against the proposal called “Keep the MUNI Lines Up on Market Street During Super Bowl Week.”

As of this writing it has 177 signatures. “I love the city,” Ogan told the Examiner, saying the Super Bowl committee’s proposal is “going to make everyone’s commute harder, for what (the committee) said is essentially an asethetic thing.”

Removal of Muni wires on Market Street or on nearby Steuart Street, alongside Justin Herman Plaza, may disrupt many bus lines as well as the historic F-Market & Wharves streetcar. Sources with knowledge of the request said removing numerous wires may cost a “seven-figure number” requiring “lots of overtime” to remove wires correctly.

Stephanie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Super Bowl 50 Host Committee, sent this statement to the Examiner: “If there is a need for temporary removal of overhead wires in this area, the Host Committee will cover that cost. We are reviewing those plans with SFMTA to make that determination.

If it is determined that some wires will come down within that three-block area, we are working to make sure that they are down for the shortest possible period of time, but final plans will be announced sometime in the next several weeks in conjunction with our partners at SFMTA.”

Those with an opinion on the Muni wires may also contact Mayor Ed Lee. His email ismayoredwinlee@sfgov.org... (more)

The 5M Project has zero affordable housing

By Dyan Ruiz : sfexaminer – excerpt

Forty percent is really zero percent when it comes to the affordable housing supposedly tied to the 5M Project.

Despite the eleventh hour deal, claims that the luxury office and housing development has 40 percent affordable housing are misleading and false. In fact, we’re left with zero affordable housing units tied to the massive Fifth and Mission development, even though we need new affordable housing now more than ever.

The 5M deals break San Francisco’s laws governing the Inclusionary Housing Program. If approved by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, 5M will set a dangerous precedent for development throughout The City enabling developers to make up their own rules to get out of their affordable requirements.

The 5M Project proposes 600 units of luxury housing in two towers. The 45-story, 400 unit luxury condo tower would be all market rate. Among these condos, there are no affordable home ownership opportunities. There’s no place for SoMa’s low-income, working class families, seniors and immigrants to have an ownership stake in the new SoMa.

The rental building has 200 luxury apartments. The 87 proposed onsite below-market-rate (BMR) apartments might be below market, but they are anything but affordable! Onsite BMR rental must be targeted to people at 55 percent of the area median income (AMI), but these units are for people making 100 percent to 150 percent AMI. The 2-bedrooms will range from $2,293/month to $3,439/month in rent.

Because the on-site units are far more costly than the law allows, the developer, Forest City, is proposing to compensate by providing some offsite affordable units. According to the current law, in order for these to count, developers must build the offsite affordable housing before their market rate units. In violation of the law, Forest City proposed to turn over a parking lot at 967 Mission St. to The City. But the developer is not actually building the 83 “affordable senior housing units.”…

Our “SoMa Community Vision” shows there could be just as much housing on the 5M site, 687 units, by capping the heights at the highest currently allowed, 160 feet. Our vision includes ground floor open space and retail, over 200,000 square feet of office, and 50 percent onsite affordable housing in keeping with The City’s Housing Balance policy. This would have much less shadow, wind and open space impacts.

The 5M Project provides nothing our community needs. In fact, the only thing it guarantees is segregation. It means most SoMa residents can’t live there. Instead of following city laws in place to create new affordable housing, Forest City wants to get away with building only their profit-driven office and residential towers, while the community gets no affordable housing. Transactions don’t make inclusive cities. In this housing crisis, we need more than smoke, mirrors and PR. We need affordable housing that is real, onsite and guaranteed.

The Board of Supervisors must reject the 5M deal, or we’ll never get affordable housing from market rate developers.

Dyan Ruiz is a member of the SoMa Action Committee (SMAC), a community coalition concerned with displacement in SoMa… (more)

 

Supes will decide on giant waterfront and SoMa projects

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

And the role of Sup. Jane Kim in cutting a deal on one of them is raising all sorts of questions

NOVEMBER 16, 2015 – Major development projects in the heart of Soma and along the waterfront will come before the Board of Supervisors Tuesday/17, and there’s a storm brewing over the role Sup. Jane Kim played in cutting a deal with one of the building groups.

It’s possible that one or both projects could be decided by a narrow margin, meaning the outcome would be different if they were delayed even a few weeks until Aaron Peskin replaces Sup. Julie Christensen.

The simpler of the two in procedural terms is 75 Howard. It’s currently a parking garage, which can hardly be called the best use of the property. The developer, however, wants to put a 220-foot building on the site, all market-rate housing (of course) – and the appellants have a lot of issues, but the biggest one is that the city has consistently moved away from upzoning the waterfront. And this building is at Howard and Steuart, right off the Embarcadero, and would cast a significant shadow on Rincon Park.

The Planning Commission certified an Environmental Impact Report that relied on a traffic study using baseline data from five years ago – and one that, the appellants argue, is so far out of date that it can’t adequately address the impact of the project. Dave Osgood, who filed the appeal on behalf of the Rincon Point Neighbors Association, also notes that the EIR didn’t consider seriously whether the project could go forward at the existing building’s height because, the report says, that wouldn’t be financially feasible… (more)

According to the appeal:

The FEIR, however, has provided no evidence to support this assertion – the FEIR simply asserts that the alternative would not have “sufficient economic viability to warrant construction of such a building.” While the City is correct that economic feasibility is not required to be discussed in an EIR, where the EIR rejects an alternative on the basis of financial feasibility the EIR should include sufficient analysis to support that conclusion.

There’s no law that requires private developers on private land who get no city subsidies to make public their finances, but it’s worth talking about.

The other, much more complex, project is the massive complex planned for Fifth and Mission, sponsored in part by Hearst Corp., which owns the Chronicle. The plan involves more than 800,000 square feet of office space, which would mean about 3,200 new workers. (That’s assuming 250 square feet per employee, which is probably high; tech companies often use 200 square feet or even less, which means more workers crammed into the office complex.).

It’s likely many of those workers will be people who move here from somewhere else.

The project will create about 600 housing units, not even enough for half the workforce.

So from the start, the plan would make the city’s housing crisis worse…

Editor: Citizens, and some at City Hall are asking:  What does affordable mean? Affordable to whom? and is there any net affordable being built, or are we merely trading in existing units, and residents for smaller units and new transient residents, who see their stay in SF as a step on the ladder of their career path?

Now here’s where it gets strange… (more)