A heated community meeting—is there any other kind?—kicks off. A developer has bought a 1,200-square-foot single-family home in a transit-rich, highly desirable location and plans to turn it into a 19-unit building. Dozens of neighbors have banded together in opposition. The building would turn “day into night” with its shadows, they tell city officials, with one person worrying about the threat of seasonal affective disorder. It would “discriminate against families,” as the units are so small. They brand it a “dorm.” They ask why not four stories instead of six; why not six units instead of 19? “Please do not beach this enormous whale in our neighborhood,” one neighbor begs.

These kinds of municipal debates happen all the time in localities across the country and mostly go unnoticed. But in San Francisco, someone is watching how the city gets built, or not, and making sure people hear about it. He does so for his own edification. He is not getting paid. He is just a guy with a computer and a bit of spare time. For the past four years, Robert Fruchtman has monitored and live-tweeted dozens and dozens—and dozens and dozens—of community meetings, including this one, about a proposed development near Dolores Park. “People just have no idea what goes on with these hearings, most of the time,” he told me. “You don’t hear about it except for snippets that occasionally make the news.”

No wonder. Not everyone enjoys watching neighbors squabble over the positioning of a bike lane or bureaucrats ensure that a building has the right paperwork to add an annex. “No one’s ever going to have a land-use-and-transportation-committee-watching party the same way people have an Oscars-watching party,” Fruchtman said. But what happens at these sorts of meetings is important. San Francisco, like many cities in California, makes many property-development decisions subject to public debate. Builders, business owners, and homeowners tend not to have the right to do what they want with their properties; instead, they have to ask city officials and their neighbors to approve their plans. This policy ensures that residents of lovely, tree-lined blocks do not get surprised by single-family homes getting razed and 19-unit buildings going up. It also is how, brick by brick, block by block, San Francisco has constructed one of the worst housing crises on Earth: Such citizen actions lead to not just the so-called preservation of neighborhood character but also sky-high rents and mortgages, worker shortages, displacement, gentrification, and climate-wrecking suburbanization.

Annie Lowrey: NIMBYism has reached its apotheosis

Fruchtman has, for years, documented this process in real time, making it easier for community activists, politicians, and journalists to notice and get involved. Can the city move forward with affordable housing at 730 Stanyan Street (delayed, but yes) or permanent supportive housing at 1800 Sutter Street (no)? How about a tiny-home village at 33 Gough Street? (Finally opened last month.) Can a developer put homes at 1846 Grove Street? (Delayed for years.) Can a homeowner build an honest-to-goodness mansion at 376 Hill Street? (Yes.)

“I look for cases where San Francisco’s progressive ideals don’t match up,” Fruchtman, who is a software engineer and volunteers with the local YIMBY group, told me. One time, he called in to a planning commission meeting to hear a debate on proposed changes to an apartment building in his neighborhood. “I guess it was lucky I logged in a little early,” he said. An established ice-cream shop, Garden Creamery, was attempting to prevent a prospective soft-serve shop, Matcha n’ More, from moving onto the same block, using a provision of a state law designed to protect against environmental degradation.

Ensue public comment! The first caller asked why the question of whether two dessert shops could operate on the same block was an issue for the planning commission in the first place. The 64th caller was more blunt. “I support the new business,” the person said, per Fruchtman, whose tweet thread on the meeting went viral. “The whole process is dumb as shit.” Still, Jason Yu of Matcha n’ More ended up spending $200,000 navigating San Francisco’s bureaucratic processes. After two years of procedural wrangling, he gave up.

This kind of kudzu does not just prevent the construction of new homes or the opening of new businesses; it also has a profound effect on the size and shape of the city and on the carbon emissions of the state. Regulatory bottlenecks increase the cost of building and drag out project timelines. What would cost $250,000 to build in rural Texas might cost $750,000 in San Francisco; what would take weeks to get approval for in Idaho might take years here. Many reasonable projects never get built at all, driving up housing costs, pushing families into homelessness, sapping the city of new businesses, and squeezing Bay Area residents out to the far-flung suburbs.

In San Francisco, “Instead of bright-line rules, where a developer knows I’m allowed to build this here, everything is a negotiation and every project proceeds on an ad hoc basis,” Jenny Schuetz, a housing economist at the Brookings Institution , told me. Small-d democratic-citizen participation has led to profoundly regressive outcomes.

That small-d democratic participation is not very democratic, for one. The kinds of people with the time and energy to show up at community meetings are disproportionately white, disproportionately old, and disproportionately wealthy, as my colleague Jerusalem Demsas has noted. They also tend to be conservative, in the sense that they like things the way they are and do not want to see 19-unit buildings going up in their neighborhoods. “Even in highly diverse communities, development meetings are dominated by whites who oppose new housing, potentially distorting the housing supply to their benefit,” one study found.

Jerusalem Demsas: Community input is bad, actually

The meetings tend to be formal. But people’s participation tends to be, well, a little unmeasured, Fruchtman told me. “Hysteria,” he said. “There’s often a sense of hysteria at these meetings that is not reflected in what you read in the press.” He recalled the time that a person described his fight to prevent the construction of a navigation center for homeless services as a kind of personal “Little Bighorn.” Or the time another person objected to the conversion of a parking lot on the grounds that it would increase traffic. Such rhetoric is “intellectual malpractice,” Fruchtman added. And the intemperate rants of the people who show up matter, as city officials hear such impassioned claims mostly from a privileged class trying to keep things as they are.

The flip side of so few participating so much is that everyone else participates so little. Who can blame them? So Fruchtman shows up. Trying to rent here was what got him interested in YIMBY politics in the first place, he told me. “I had dropped out of graduate school and got a job offer out in Silicon Valley,” he said. “I was trying to line up an apartment before I got to the city. And I realized how bad it was. Besides the sticker shock, it was the fact that anytime I emailed anybody or called anybody about an apartment, every single time, they said it was taken. Trying to get an apartment a month out or even a week out was impossible.”

He did find a place, in time. And part of his motivation for going to or calling into or watching so many public meetings is that he came to San Francisco to find himself and his community—and it pains him that others might not be able to. “One reason I wanted to move to San Francisco specifically is, as a gay man, it really always stood out to me my whole life as a place where I could be accepted,” he told me.

The NIMBY tide is finally beginning to recede in the state and the city, thanks to activism and the rise of YIMBY elected officials. A flurry of bills have streamlined the permitting process and exempted more projects from discretionary review, as well as allowing property owners to build structures like casitas by right. Still, the state is short of millions of housing units, and the thirst for apartments and homes in San Francisco feels unquenchable.

A bunch of 19-unit buildings are what the city needs, if not what its residents want. At that meeting, after they made their complaints, the builder responded that their proposed changes would make the project financially infeasible. A city supervisor worried that the tall building would “blow through” the objections of the community. The board gave a kind of go ahead for the developer to build. Now the project is tied up in litigation. It may never break ground.

The post One Man’s Quest to Repair San Francisco’s Housing Disaster appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

At the age of 63, Donald Vanneman III, who lives in San Francisco, was all about the thrill and experienced one adventure after the next. Last month – on a solo road trip to charming hot springs that were closed due to the pandemic and hidden deep in California’s most unforgiving desert valley – he went too far.

Vanneman wasn’t the first to die in Saline Valley Warm Springs, an extremely remote collection of hot spring baths and camping areas that were colonized by hippies, survivors, and rock dogs in the 1960s and annexed to Death Valley National Park in 1994.

“A long time ago, before the place became known and popular, people died at the springs and people along the street,” says Tom Ganner, the springs’ former camp manager. “Cars would break down, people would drive off looking for help, and they would expire.”

Park spokeswoman Abby Wines says she cannot recall any deaths in the area in recent years. Regardless of whether there have been others, Vannemans is unusual. It has caused a stir in the large community that still holds these hot springs sacred, as demonstrated by heated discussions in internet groups devoted to the site. Some group members expressed confusion about how this could happen. Others expressed their condolences. Many are angry. They say Vanneman did not respect “the source”.

Vanneman’s life, as portrayed on his Facebook page and described by his sister Donna Kerr Vanneman, was tumultuous. He grew up in Southern California, attended Cornell University, and developed HIV as a young gay man, his sister said.

“He was [one of] The first 500 men to receive the new drug in this study, ”she wrote in a post recalling her brother on Facebook. “A year later he was the only one alive. He took these drugs until he was around 40 years old. “

Vanneman has lived at the Castro for the past three decades, just a block from the Castro Theater, his sister said, and his two great loves were his partner Allan Sanchez and his service dog Shakespeare. Despite struggling with mental health problems, his sister said he had a “wonderful” job managing the Plaza Hotel, and in his spare time he loved traveling and camping.

Vanneman’s Facebook page is mostly made up of photos of him and his old mutt Shakespeare. Together they traveled all over California, visiting the mountains, beaches and deserts, and Saline Valley Warm Springs was clearly a special place for Vanneman.

On his featured photos, he shows a picture of one of the pools in Saline Valley Warm Springs with the meaningful caption: “Fled to Death Valley by the bishop 03/19/2008 to die, instead found paradise and pagans without leaving until 04/09. 2008. ”

For those intrepid enough to find the Saline Valley, it has often made such an impression. The springs are in the remote northwest corner of Death Valley National Park, 35 miles from the nearest paved road. In the 1950s, when the area was still under the control of the Bureau of Land Management, early settlers developed bathtubs and art installations there. They also built makeshift dishwashing stations, showers and latrines, and planted lawns and palm trees. Charles Manson and his followers are said to have visited, and the place was apparently quite wild.

“In the past, you could undress with a six-shooter in one hand and a can of beer in the other and ride a motorcycle through the dunes,” jokes Ganner, the old warehouse manager. “Now they’re making you wear a helmet and put your beer down. And no weapons. It’s no longer fun. “

The area was placed under Park Service control under the California Desert Protection Act in 1994, and while public nudity is still widespread at the sources, lewd behavior is now prohibited, according to the Death Valley website.

There is no camping or day use fee, but valet parking allows guests to stay at the springs for only 30 days in any given year. Many are taking advantage of this, although weather conditions can be harsh and there are no services at all.

The main attraction is the three tier system of hot springs lined up along a 3 mile stretch of road in the valley. Each level has multiple soaking pools with names like Dragon Pool, Volcanic Pool, and Wizarding Pool (named after the man who lived the longest on the property and who served as the caretaker until his death). There are also moving burros, a dirt runway, and the occasional low-flying jets, as the area is part of the US military’s R-2508 Special Use Airspace Complex. For those taking the treacherous 3 to 4 hour washboard road ride from Big Pine over the pass into the Saline Valley, this bizarre place and welcoming community often becomes a haven.

Of course, there are a few unspoken rules, mainly so as not to take photos of naked people and not to destroy the place. But here’s a big question: don’t bathe in the spring pools. They not only supply the other pools, but also the communal kitchen with water. So if they get contaminated with the naked body, for example, problems arise. For some of the people who have been visiting this oasis for decades, the spring pools are considered sacred.

During the pandemic, the Park Service closed the camping areas and emptied the bathtubs at Saline Valley Warm Springs. On December 20, Donald Vanneman drove to the construction site with Shakespeare anyway. When he found that the thermal pools were empty, he bathed in one of the spring pools and ignored a sign telling people not to enter, Park Operator Wines. “Our hydrologist’s best guess is that the pool was likely around 105 degrees Fahrenheit,” Wines wrote in an email.

What happened next was “not publicly known,” said Ganner, one of several people aware of the details of Vanneman’s death. “He was out there and copied,” says Ganner. “I am not at liberty to go into the details.”

A press release issued by the Park Service said the campsite volunteer host noticed Vanneman’s vehicle early December 20 but could not find it. “Later that day, two park visitors discovered his body in the Palm Springs spring pool,” the press release said.
When asked about Vanneman’s cause of death, Wines wrote, “It was an accident – no further details available.”

When asked if Vanneman’s personal belongings were found by the pool or if anything unusual was found in his person, Wines wrote: “He was bathing.”

The Inyo County Coroner Bureau declined to produce Vanneman’s coroner report, citing an open investigation. Vanneman’s sister revealed the cause of Vanneman’s death to SFGATE, which was quite unusual. “I had to look it up,” she said. But Vanneman’s sister asked that, due to her personal nature, the cause not be published in this story. He has problems with his heart, she added, and has struggled with bipolar disorder in his final years, she said.

According to his sister, Shakespeare joined Vanneman in his final adventure and was found in the Saline Valley. “[He] was alive but old so they had to put him down, ”she wrote on Facebook. “I will pray a long time for Shakespeare and my brother.”

When frequent visitors to Saline Valley Warm Springs learned of Vanneman’s death in a spring pool, they were distraught, confused, saddened, and even angry.

“That’s sad, but seriously, WTF?” A member of the Saline Valley Warm Springs Facebook group posted about the incident. “The pools are closed and drained and he was in the middle spring source pool. Ignorant? Entitled? Both?”

“Who would ever go to the source pool, closings or not?” another group member wrote. “Basic pool protocol and a no no at all levels. Sad but stupid. “

Confusion arose as to which spring pool Vanneman died in as the main spring pool is extraordinarily hot (he was not in this one). Some group members thought Vanneman might be a man they knew who was referred to as LED Don, but another member disagreed.

“No way would LED disregard the source,” she wrote.

Concerns have been raised about whether the valet service could take steps to close the springs or fence off areas. Wines clarified this in an email to SFGATE. “NPS has no plans to take any additional action,” she wrote.

Troubled by the tone of the conversation, a group member came to Vanneman’s defense. “Who cares whether they should be in there or not,” she wrote. “These mean comments are very inconsiderate. The poor guy is gone. “

“It’s a cautionary story for all of us,” wrote another user.

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